tales of the city · 2019-06-02 · 1 lucille sat on the front row of the lecture theatre, her...

Tales of the City

Mun Thye Mak

November 22, 2014

Contents

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Transcript for Interview 1 15

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4 125

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4 CONTENTS

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Lucille sat on the front row of the lecture theatre, her fingers drumming on thetouch-board surface absent-mindedly. It was a history lecture covering the periodleading up to the formation of the neo city-state in 2050. It was starting to getboring as the lecturer droned on in front of her.

“As you can see,” Mr Lim said while pointing out at the chronological diagramthat he had brought up from a flick of his finger on the touch-board surface of thelecturn, “the early 2010s were a period of grave disturbances. It seems that mostof the people then have forgotten just how similar circumstances nearly a centuryago caused one of the largest global-scale conflict—the first world war.

“Some say that it was the continual mismanagement of economy that spawnedthe levels of disgruntedness that led to the eventual tearing down of the socialorder, while others said it was the ongoing plan of the five biggest powers ofthe time to generate a world of constant conflict to ensure that technology andinnovation would always be of paramount importance compared to the other morestagnant forms of output to the economy like diplomacy and cooperation.

“There are, as you all should know by now from this class, a multitude ofreasons why these things occur, some of which we have already discussed before,and many that we haven’t. For the final project for this class, I propose this.” MrLim paused for a moment and flicked his finger on the touch-board surface. Theprojector faded to dark and brought out a new image outlining a series of highlydense bullet points.

Lucille perked up when she saw the contents of the slide. ‘Finally,’ she thoughtto herself as she touched a couple of icons on her touch-board surface to store theslide on to her online storage system, ‘the final big piece of work that needs to bedone for this class, and I can move on to the more interesting things.’

It wasn’t that Lucille hated the history class—it was one of the easier generaleducation classes that she could have all semester—but that she saw little to noneed to worry about what happened in the past. The neo-conservatists had beatenback the anarcho-restorists nearly thirty years ago, and the neo city-state had

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undergone a steady improvement in overall quality of life. As far as she could tell,the anarcho-restorists were holding on to old ideas of freedom and independenceat the expense of security and prosperity, and given the kinds of progress they hadseen, she was sure that they were all nonsense to begin with.

Also, as an engineer in training, she really didn’t care too much about history.It was an easy subject, but not something to spend lots of time on.

“As I was saying,” Mr Lim said, jarring Lucille back from her wanderingthought, “I want to change things up a little. Some of you might have heardfrom your predecessors that the final project for this class had always been someboring reading assignment where you’ll do some kind of comparative analysis ofliterature about the era of the Restoration Conflict. I was thinking of doing thesame this year, but realised to my own horror that I would be reading the samekind of dried up drivel for the fourth year running, in addition to the general com-plaint that it was hard and boring to attempt comparison among five books thatwere talking about the same thing more or less. So let’s do something different.

“This time, you will still do a comparative analysis of issues relating to theRestoration Conflict, but you will be including some primary sources. As youremember, primary sources can be interviews with people, or reading actual copiesof works that were written during that era, or any thing that did not undergo anyfurther analysis by a scholar or professor. I have did some calculations—it is stillpossible to get some interviews from people who lived in the era, if you are willingto do a bit more work. It should allow you folks to appreciate the work thathistorians had been doing to catalogue the vignettes of life that was long gone.”

Lucille’s ears perked up and her face was a mask of dismay. Primary sourcework? That meant having to actually look up people to talk to, and to searchthrough old micro-film that were not indexed by the neo-net engines. That meantit wasn’t going to be easy. She cursed under her breath at the sudden increase inworkload, all for a measly general education class that she was taking for pass/failonly.

“For those who are taking the class for pass/fail, I would like to remind youthat the final project is half your grade at the minimum. If I am unsatisfied thatyou have learnt anything from this class, I can and will fail you. Any questions?”

Lucille swore again under her breath as she made a few more notes with thetouch-board surface, her gloved finger making impressions on a virtual keyboardto enter some of the more salient points. ‘It’s almost as though he could read mymind,’ Lucille thought to herself as she pushed all the notes and data on to heronline storage system. Later in the day she would pull the information down toher persacomputer to look at it in details.

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Mr Lim looked around at the fifty bored faces of students in his class, fullyanticipating the usual one or two questions. But throughout the silence, there wasnone. Not one. He could not tell if they fully understood what it was that he said,or that they did not care. But he will have to worry about that later, possiblyduring office hours. He knew that the ego and reservation of his students meantthat they would hardly ever volunteer anything in class, whether to ask a questionor to provide an answer. But it was during office hours that they would suddenlyopen up to let out all of their problems and issues for consideration. Seeing thatnothing was going to happen after all, Mr Lim dismissed the class.

Lucille stood up from her seat in the lecture hall, the touch-board screen fadingto dark. She liked the touch-board screen—it was a great convenience to not haveto lug around anything more than herself. The access tokens for her online storagespace and compute time were all embedded in her wrist, and all the touch-boardscreens were designed to work with anyone’s access tokens to provide the user hisor her own personal environment to work with, no matter where they were. ‘Justone of the cool things that the neo-conservatists promised and delivered,’ Lucillethought to herself. The world’s information all easily accessible from any nearbytouch-board screen, much better than the slew of personal devices that Mr Limtalked about during the Restoration Conflict.

Lucille exited the lecture theatre and stood outside under the sunlight andbasked in its glory for a moment, shutting her eyes while directing her face towardsold Sol. The warmth of the sun was always comforting to her, especially after ahistory lecture session like the one that she just had. The last general educationclass that she needed before graduation, and she couldn’t have gotten a betterlecturer too.

Mr Lim. He had a. . . reputation in the university. A little bit rogueish innature, and always thought-provoking, or at least, provoking thought. Many ofthe course reviews from the other students have ranked him high on the list oflecturers that one should look out for when going for a history module. He wasalso the youngest faculty member, unsurprising enough, and it was likely that hisability to connect with the students stemmed from that.

But the thoughts on her mind were lost when she heard a familiar voice.

“Hey Lu!” She smiled as she looked forward while opening her eyes.

“Hey Frisco!”

He screwed his face up in mock annoyance before replying with the standardone, “you know I’m not Frisco! Hahahahahaha. . . hungry?”

“Sure I am, Justin,” Lucille replied as he gave her a quick peck on the cheek.They strolled hand-in-hand to the cafeteria nearby where the lunch crowd was

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already gathering.

“What do you feel like going for?”

“Let’s do Western today! I’m craving for some fries.”

“Ugh,” Justin saied screwing up his face again in mock disgust. “Weren’t yousaying that you needed to watch your diet in case you got fatter?”

Lucille thwacked Justin playfully on the arm before giving him the I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about face as the two of them made their way to thequeue in front of the stall that was selling Western-styled meals. Of course, callingthe food “Western” was like an anachronism—it was as “Western” as having ricerolled up between pieces of seaweed was “Japanese”. They queued and chatteduntil it was their turn, and they both made their orders before bringing up theirwrists to the touch-screen board at the stall to pay for their food with the foodcredits.

Lucille looked at the balance on the touch-board screen and grimaced a little.‘I should tell mum to send me more food credits. I think I’m going to run out ofthem within a week.’

“Maybe you should eat less, I don’t think you have enough food credits rightthere,” Justin said as the touch-board screen cleared and it was his turn to payfor his food.

“Maybe you should find a new girlfriend if you are going to keep telling me I’mfat in my face,” Lucille snapped back a little too harshly, surprising even herself.Justin walked away from the touch-board screen and looked at her, shocked, beforerecovering a little and walking along with her to their designated table in thecafeteria to dig in.

An awkward silence descended on the table as they both sat down to eat.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know what came over me,” Lucille said, breaking the silence.

“No worries, I think I can figure out why. Just don’t let it get to you. This isthe last semester, right?” Justin replied as he quietly chewed on his food.

“Yes. Thank goodness for the scholarship though. If I didn’t have that, it’dprobably be worse. The only thing that it doesn’t supply is the food and livingexpenses part—I’m just glad that lodging and tuition is handled. Those are thebig ticket items. I’m still wondering why they don’t provide food credits alongwith it. Considering everything, food credits will probably be the least expensiveof the lot,” Lucille replied.

“Well, you know why it is the case. Just focus on the studying and then youcan get a nice job and make enough credits to repay your mum.”

The two of them fell silent as they finished up the rest of their lunch. Theyhad heard of stories from the past that the cafeteria was always a place of near

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maximum chaos during lunch time, where everyone had to spend an inordinatelylarge amount of time finding places to sit and have a meal in peace. With thecareful use of the access tokens that were embedded in everyone’s wrists, suchproblems were a thing of the past—each time someone came up to the touch-board screen at the stall to pay, they also learn of their allocated spot among themany tables and chairs in the cafeteria in which to sit and have their meal. It wasfar more efficient and was more orderly than before.

But they never knew the gravity of what it was like.

Their lunch concluded, Lucille and Justin parted ways. Justin had a recitationsession coming up that he had to see to, while Lucille wanted to head back to herdormitory room to take a break from all the classes and look at the assignment inmore detail. She was done for the day, and some solitude was always welcomed.

Lucille sat at her desk in the small room that she shared with no one, thetouch-board screen glowing gently to counteract the bright ambient light from thesun that streamed through the windows whose curtains and blinds were openedto the fullest by her. She loved the sun light for some reason; she had no idea whyit was so. Her mother had told her that it was one of those weird habits that shehad developed when she was younger, and she never really got out of the habit atall, even after all those years. The touch-board screen displays worked well underboth strong and weak ambient lights, and it was convenient to work with them,given their ubiquity.

Lucille sighed and she opened up the folder on her online storage to retrievethe stack of notes that she had squirrelled away from Mr Lim’s history class. Itwas one of the three classes that she was taking in that last semester—the othertwo were some special interest classes relating to computer science and computerengineering that she thought would be useful when she was working. It was amuch lighter load, less than the required number of credit-hours for a semester,but since it was her last, she was permitted to do so. She could have taken anothermodule—and she had one other in mind—but had thought better of it. She neededthe time to actually start hunting around for jobs. The scholarship hinted thatthe government was willing to give her a job for the first two years that was highlyrelated to what she was studying, but there was no firm statement with regardsto how and when. She had been told by the career counsellor to be pro-active inlooking for a job, just in case the government decided to either forego a job forher or to change the policy at the last minute to require all scholarship holders tolook for their own jobs and to work for a pre-set time. There were some legally

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gray areas, the counsellor had said, but it was not completely illegal, for sure.

The folder opened up and the notes spilled out on to the touch-board screen,as though someone had opened a bag of potpourri with a little too much force,causing the pieces to fly hither and tither. But like all things, the spillage wasnot as random as it seemed—Lucille knew that the contents of the folder werearranged in a way that made cognition easier, or put simply, there was an orderbehind the seeming chaos. It just appeared disorderly as a throwback to a moreconcrete way of working, with real folders and real files and real pieces of paperstrewn this way and that. She could have sworn it was some programmer’s (ormore likely project manager’s) idea of a joke.

She looked at the sprawled nuggets of information on the touch-board screen,twirling her hair absent-mindedly. The handout that Mr Lim provided for theproject stood out for some reason. She flicked her gloved finger at the touch-board screen and bring it out to full view. The document enlarged itself into arectangle and filled up a full thirty-five centimetres of height, the width scaling upaccordingly.

Lucille looked at its contents and started reading it intently:

HIST-356 Final Project

We have spent half the semester discussing the issues and events leading up to,occurring of, and consequences of the Restoration Conflict. For the final project,you will need to write a final report of no less than 10 pages, double-spaced, onyour own critical analysis of the events that led to the Restoration Conflict. Likeprevious iterations of the final project of this class, you are expected to make useof both primary and secondary sources to back your critical analysis of how theRestoration Conflict came to be.

For students who are taking this on a pass/fail, you are expected to obtainat least three interviews as three primary sources for your final paper; the othersneed at least one. See this not as a penalty for not taking this class for a fullletter grade, but as a means of experiencing the joys and frustrations of field workby historians, something that you are unlikely to have a chance at doing in yourfuture endeavours.

Please make use of office hours to help define the scope of work for your finalproject as well as to discuss any other issues that you may have with regards tothe final project.

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‘Well, that’s a shocker,’ Lucille thought to herself as she read the short handout regarding the final project. As far as she could tell, there were only two orthree of the fifty or so students who were taking the class for pass/fail, and thatrequirement of having interviews for primary sources was a requirement that wasshocking though not altogether unreasonable. But the class was rated at the juniorlevel, so requiring more work and deeper scholarship seemed par for the course.

Lucille leant back on her chair and thought a little more to herself. Gettingthree interviews would be a little tricky but not completely impossible. The fastestway would probably be to ask her mother. Lucille knew that she was involved inpart with the Restoration Conflict during the time, but she never did talk muchabout it. ‘Maybe because I’d never ask her,’ Lucille thought to herself. TheRestoration Conflict was something that no one really liked talking about exceptin class. Actually, it was one of those things that no one really wanted to talkabout, even in class, except of course for Mr Lim’s history, where the RestorationConflict itself was the main topic that it discussed. Officially of course the coursewas on late twentieth and early twenty-first century events, but everyone knewthat if Mr Lim was teaching it, the Restroation Conflict was the final topic thattook the most time out of the entire course. It was, as Mr Lim had put before,the reason why the neo city-state came into existence in the first place.

Lucille flicked her finger along the touch-board screen and pulled up an emptyrectangle. Dictating, she made a note to talk to her mother about living throughthe Restoration Conflict. Lucille did some simple calculations, and found thatwhen the Restoration Conflict began, her mother was roughly at her age. Thatrealisation jarred on her nerves when she realised the kinds of consequences thatseemed to come out of it. At her age. Lucille wondered if her mother had doneanything at all to either support or denounce the Restoration Conflict; it was saidthat many students in that era were involved in one political uprising or another,like the other student populations before them.

If her mother had been involved, it would be an interview worth having.

Lucille sat there and thought harder about who else she could ask for aninterview. It was not going to be easy or even possible to find other people whohad lived through that period for interviews—she lacked the resources and timeof a full-time historian. Besides, the overall analysis might be too fragmented tohold as a single cogent narrative, a problem that she knew would be hard or evenimpossible to rectify even with a lot of heavy editing and fluff in the final paper.

An idea came to her. Perhaps an analysis of how families reacted to theRestoration Conflict. It was something that was much easier to write on, and itwas definitely much easier to find people to interview—in addition to her mother,

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Lucille could also talk to grandma, and even Uncle Ted. She knew for sure thatthe three of them had gone through the Restoration Conflict, and Uncle Ted wasalways telling stories about how he and his compatriots were fighting for the rightfor independent thought, the true anarcho-restorists way, “back in the day”. Itwould be an interesting series of interviews.

And since she was the last of a chain of descendents from that time, she couldalso understand the circumstances surrounding it all, leading to an essay that waseasy to write without having to ham it up too much.

Excited, Lucille opened up another new rectangle document and dictated itscontents, describing her proposed three interviews as well as the type of narrativethat she was going for. She thought a little more and fleshed out the contents abit before sending it off to Mr Lim. With that temporarily out of the way, Lucilleflicked her finger along the touch-board screen and shoved all the documents andpieces back into the folder and tucked it aside, pushing it gently back to the onlinestorage system.

She then pulled out the folder on one of her computer science modules andemptied its contents on the touch-board screen, and proceeded to work on thehomework that was due in two days’ time.

It was a good three hours later when the tell-tale ding from the touch-boardscreen informed Lucille that she had a new notification. Mildly irate, she sweptthe things on the touch-board screen aside and pulled down the notification. Itwas a reply from Mr Lim. Curious at what he had to say, she opened up thenotification and read its reply.

Lucille, that’s an interesting concept that you have for the final project. Analysingthe Restoration Conflict from the perspective of families is an approach that islargely attempted, but with mixed results. Using people who have gone throughthe Restoration Conflict and are still alive now as interview subjects is a goodidea, but since they are family, don’t forget about the potential biases that cancome about. I suggest that you get them to narrate what they had witnessedand done instead of actually trying for a traditional question and answer type ofinterview. You should attach the transcripts of the the interviews as annexes tothe final report.

Unfortunately, the transcripts will not count towards the 10-page requirement.=)

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Looking forward to what you have to write. Remember that office hours areopen for discussion on anything that is related to your final project.

Andrew LIMSenior LecturerDepartment of HistoryPolytechnic University of XXXX

‘Well that’s a relief,’ Lucille thought to herself. ‘I thought there would be issueson the subject matter, but it seems to go well with him. I’ll just roll with it then.But first, I need to finish up that piece of homework.’

With that in mind, Lucille swiped off the reply from Mr Lim and brought backthe controlled mess that was her homework for the computer science module. Itwas an algorithms homework assignment, requiring a good design of algorithms tosolve specific problems that were outlined in the problem set. There was also theneed for proving that the algorithms that were written were indeed correct, but thetouch-board screen had access to automated theorem provers that were purposelyrestricted for the purposes of the assignment. She worked on it for another hourbefore giving up, having completed nearly two thirds of the entire assignment.

A couple of rapt knocks on her door were all she needed to convince herself ofthe need to put away her work.

“Come in!” Lucille said as she shoved all her homework back into the folderand gently pushed it to the online storage system. She heard the tell tale soundof a wrist touching the sensor and the door unlocking itself when it detected thatit was one of the five people that Lucille had allowed explicit access to her dormroom on command.

Justin pushed the door open gently and strode in, his backpack slung on oneshoulder, with the door closing silently behind him before clicking lock once again.He put his backpack down at the foot of her bed and walked over to her, huggingher from behind.

“Mmm,” Lucille moaned quietly through her closed eyes. “I missed you.”“Sure you did,” Justin said as he removed his arms and pulled up a chair next

to her. “Ready for dinner?”“Pretty much,” Lucille replied, standing up and tying up her hair into a loose

pony tail. “Let me get dressed and let’s go.”

Transcript for Interview 1

Lucille: So Uncle Ted, how have you been?Ted: Doin’ alright ya l’il scamp. What’s up?Lucille: I’m having this history final project on the Restoration Conflict. . .Ted: Oh! That old thing? And let me guess, you want ol’ Uncle Ted to tell

you some stories about that old thing?Lucille: Well, yes. I need some primary sources for my paper, and since I am

taking this class for pass/fail, I need three interviews as primary sources.Ted: Ah. . . that. It sounds familiar. So I’ll guess again, your mother and

grandmother are the two other people you are going to interview?Lucille: How. . . wow. How did you figure out, uncle?Ted: Easy! You don’t know enough old people around. Well, not so much as

you don’t know enough old people, but that there aren’t enough old people aroundfor you to talk to anyway. And we three are probably the closest that you caneasily get to for the what. . . last seven or so weeks of class?

Lucille: Pretty much. . . will you be telling them that I approached you?Ted: Niece, lemme tell you some thing about these things. You don’t tell them

anything. No need to. Anyway, I owe you some kind of story, right? Don’t youhave specific questions to ask or something?

Lucille: Not really. The lecturer suggested that I just listen to the first-handnarratives from my interviewees before sitting down and doing some kind of com-parative analysis.

Ted: Ah, a sly one, that lecturer of yours. Alright then, grab yourself a nicecup of coffee from my tumbler, sit back, and let your recorder keep recording. I’lltell you a story. Maybe you can use it for your project, or may be not. Whoknows?

These days you don’t hear much of these things any more. All you hear are theeffects of the Restoration Conflict, how everything became centralised and opti-

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16 TRANSCRIPT FOR INTERVIEW 1

mised to the point of increasing the overall efficiency and productivity of everyonewho is working in the neo city-state. It wasn’t that way. Well, they tried somekind of ham-fisted approach to do what we are doing now, but it was ham-fistedenough that it pissed enough people off to trigger the Restoration Conflict. I sup-pose I could go into a whole lot of theories and try to explain things, but I don’tthink that’s what you want to hear. So let me start from how I first got a whiffof the whole series of things that came before the Restoration Conflict.

I was twenty-one. The year was 2006. Google was already a well-known name,and Facebook was something that was starting to gain traction. I went to theuniversity, just like every one of us in that age group, even yourself now tooLucille. The economy was recovering a little from the dot-com bust nearly fiveyears ago, and things were looking up in general.

As a student, I hated politics. I found it boring. Things seemed to be movingwell, almost as well as in the 1990s itself. I was studying; I didn’t have to worryabout the so-called “bread and butter issues” simply because I was on scholarship.In those days, the scholarships were broken largely into two or three kinds: privatesector scholarships, public sector scholarships for quasi-government agencies andpublic sector scholarships for government agencies. The differences between themwere mostly on the level of prestige and the types of obligations that one neededto take on immediately after the completion of the particular degree programme.

As I was saying, I was on a scholarship then. Not important which one. Okay,I lied, it is somewhate important. Probably more important than I would care toadmit after all these years. It wasn’t the private sector scholarship that I was on,I assure you. If I were on that kind of scholarship, things might have been verydifferent, and I mightn’t have gone down the path I did and end up becoming oneof those anarcho-restorists that you’ve read about.

Niece, you seem surprised. I don’t look like I was an anarcho-restorist? Well,you are partly correct—I am not an anarcho-restorist now, but I was quite thehellfire back in the day. But I’m jumping the gun here, am I not, jumping toconclusions before I have even said anything about the premises that led up to theconclusions that I was drawing.

So anyway, I was studying, overseas I might add, and was generally oblviousto the happenings back at home. Then I graduated some three years later andreturned in 2009, where I had to start working at a quasi-government agency toserve out my obligations as stipulated in the scholarship contract. It wasn’t a badgig, that job I mean. Decent pay, interesting work, relatively liberal time schedulein the sense that I never needed to be in the office during the office hours most ofthe time, as long as I did what I was supposed to do and attended the meetings

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when they were called for. So, more productivity based than just merely showingup.

You might think of this as being normal now, but I assure you that this wasn’tthe case back in the day.

There was this. . . culture of just keeping up with appearances regardless ofactual overall productivity and efficiency. So, you’ll often find many office workerswho just stay in the office late to appear as though they were working hard, eventhough they were probably not working on anything at all during all that time.Some of the folks who stayed in late had legitimate reasons—they had to do thework that was not done by those who were keeping up with appearances. It wasa fact of life of some sort that despite having a job scope spelt out as clear asday on the first day that one arrives at the company for work, the actual workthat was done was anything but the job scope that was highlighted. So it wasn’tsurprising to find that while some people were just keeping up with appearancesand looking as though they were working on ten projects simultaneously with thesame intense focus, there were others who had to actually do more than their fairshare to ensure that they keep the projects running smoothly.

At my place, I was lucky. Well, sort of. I worked hard, and didn’t try to keepup with appearances because there were almost none to do—not everyone wasin the office at all times anyway, and since the key performance indicators weremeasuring output anyway instead of number of hours put in, there was no incentiveto look busy when one could simply focus on their work and finish it on time andin time. I did a lot of computer program writing back in the day, and it requiredbouts of intense concentration punctuated by periods of restful contemplation. Sounlike the spreadsheet crunching or slide show generating people, it was hard tokeep up with appearances of being hard at work all the time even if I wanted to.

So far it sounds boring right? But that’s how it all began—it began by beingboring. The status quo was getting stagnant in a sense, and with increasingamount of “fake work” as done by those who were there merely to keep up withappearances, there was a slow decline in overall productivity. It was somethingthat no one really noticed until the state number crunchers started to churn outquarterly reports that showed an overall drop of gross domestic product. It ofcourse drew a strong reaction from those who made the decisions, as well as thosewho were employers.

Let me try to rephrase that bit a little. What we have is a situation wherethe number of workers are the same, their overall work output is dropping due towasted time from the whole “keeping up with appearances” sham, and there’s aneed to crank up the total work output to ensure that the city-state on its own


keeps up with the world’s output to ensure that it maintains relevance.

Put simply, it was a lot of pressure right there.

What happened was beyond everyone’s reckoning. The government at the timedecided to lower the requirements on foreign workers coming in to the city-state towork. There had always been foreigners on work visas in the city-state working atvarious levels, but they were usually present due to special circumstances, eitheras managers for portfolios relating to their originating countries, or as seasonalworkers for the various construction sites that are around, or as domestic help forfamilies that needed an extra helping hand, like those who had old or handicappedmembers of the family at home that needed supervision while the rest of the familywas out working. But the lowering of the work visa requirements was the start ofa series of events that led to the Restoration Conflict.

You see, even with the levy on the work visas for such foreign workers, itwas cheaper to hire them. Much cheaper. Ludicrously cheaper actually. Due tothe exchange of currencies and the associated purchasing power parity, the dollaramount they earn at the city-state was equivalent to a small fortune back in theiroriginating countries. So employers can literally entice foreign workers to comeover with what is effectively a lower salary compared to what is paid to those ofus who were already working on the same jobs then.

To make matters worse, all the city-state’s citizens and permanent residentswere supposed to contribute to a state savings account, with the amount beinga percentage of the actual pay, with no opt-out scheme. I see that you lookconfused—it is sort of like the savings account that everyone has now, except thatinstead of making it optional whether you deposit money into it, they made itmandatory with the reason that it was a good way for people to safeguard againsttheir eventual retirement.

But there was a catch. Well, to begin with, it worked well. The early years ofthe city-state post the second world war were quite tumultous, and people werefretting more on survival than anything. The concept of retirement was as far-fetched then as it is now. Since it was always so pressing to worry about how oneis living now compared to the future, the concept of saving money was not deeplyingrained. And so the government of that era created a national-level savingsaccount designed specifically for retirement use, and every working person hadto contribute a percentage of their wages into it per month without exceptions.It worked well until they change the policy some time in the 1980s when theyrealised that their inflation models were inaccurate under the prevailing economicsituation, and that the increasing life expectancies were throwing off the actuarytables they were using to determine the amount of money the accont should have

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when the person retired.

Thus, hiring and retaining workers who were permanent residents or citizenswere actually costly since there was a need to factor in the extra amount to be putinto the state savings account while maintaining enough money for living expenses.But for the people on work visas, there was no need for that contribution, whichmeant that it was cheaper still to hire them for work! And so there was a largeinflux of foreign workers.

I didn’t worry too much at that time; I was young, I had a job, and I enjoyedwhat I was doing. At first, apart from the few who were either prescient or mad,no one else worried too much either. There was a strong sense that the governmentknew what it was doing, and so everyone just kept quiet and let them be on theirmerry way; who else would know what is best for the city-state other than thegovernment, right?

But slowly the effects of that policy started to manifest itself. I found thatmy colleagues started to be replaced, slowly of course, by new foreign faces. AndI didn’t even mean that they were of a different race—that meant nothing sincethe city-state was well-known to be a racially harmonious place—but that theywere from different countries. It started slowly, then one day I looked around andrealised that I was one of the few citizens or permanent residents left.

The impact was appreciable. Everywhere I walked, I started to hear foreigntongues discussing and chatting. Every time when there was a meeting that Iwas involved with, there was a high chance that it would began with a foreigntongue by default before someone realised that I was there and they would switchto English. Strange smells started to emanate from the pantry when the pungentfood was consumed during lunch, almost overwhelming the pantry’s ventilationsystem. It started to get uncomfortable at the work place.

That was when the first few anarcho-restorists were formed. Of course, theydidn’t call themselves “anarcho-restorists”—it’s a term that the neo-conservatistscalled them later on—they had called themselves “true patriots”. But you don’thear that term any more; it’s more or less outlawed or made so cheesy by thepropoganda that no one bothers to use that term. I don’t know if they were truepatriots, but I knew that at first I didn’t pay much attention to them. Theysounded like they were just there to cause havoc.

They started small. The first thing that they tried to do was to get people awareof the types of injustice that were present. It wasn’t easy. Even though everyoneknew that something was not quite right and that there was an underlying currentof dissatisfaction, not many wanted to expose themselves to the kinds of risk thatone would be if one were outed as an anarcho-restorist. The few pioneering people


organised weekly “protests” at the only available free-speech public area in the city-state, this being ironic considering that the freedom of speech was a guaranteedright in the constitution. But it really wasn’t as ironic as it seemed, since theconstitution of that time was heavily tempered with conditionals and exceptionsthat protected the ability of the government to overrule the constitution in timeswhere there was a national security implication.

Niece, you look confused again. Let me explain a little further; maybe thiswill help your ma and grandma to tell their stories at a more comfortable pacethan me since you don’t need them to try and give you their own interpretationsof what it all meant. As far as I can tell, they were never anarcho-restorists, andare therefore less. . . shall we say attuned to the nuances of it all.

Before the Restoration Conflict, the city-state was home to many different racesof people. There were the three official working languages that everyone used thatwe still have now in the neo city-state, but things were more heterogenous thenas compared to now. You see, the identity of the people in the city-state was lessfirm as compared to now, and people had a tendency to identify first with theirrace and community before identifying as a member of the city-state. That usedto cause a lot of problems even further back in the past where I wasn’t even bornyet, so such extra powers were granted by the government to itself to ensure thatsuch issues never cropped up. You live in a time where the national identity is veryclearly defined, and all these issues of harmony and the need to balance betweenracial and national identity is at most an academic issue.

But back to the story. They started small. They formed small protests whichwere more like some kind of soapbox-esque rhetoric than a real protest in orderto get people to realise what the eventual outcome was going to be if the trendswere to continue. In the beginning, no one cared. It was easy to ignore them;they didn’t have any clout, they were made up of no named nobodies that meantnothing to no one. But as the years went on, in 2010, in 2011 all the way to 2013,some of the injustices that these proto-anarcho-restorists were pointing out likethe doomsayers of old were starting to be felt by enough of the general populacethat it was no longer something to be ignored.

Back to me. Mind you, during these time I was still working at the same quasi-government agency. My colleagues were now mostly foreigners, and I was sloggingalong trying to work as best as I can. The thing with people is that no matterwhere they are from, no matter what kind of circumstances they had before, ifthere was a way to gain something from little to no work, they would sooner learnto do so than not. And that was precisely what happened. The originally hard-working but lesser paid foreigners picked up the bad habits of “keeping up with

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appearances” and reduced their productivity over time, and their work load wassteadily being distributed to those who were lower on the pecking order. In mycase, that was me.

After three years of working there, I started to feel harried. There were endlessunproductive meetings where we all sat around a table in a conference room pre-tending to be making big decisions when it wasn’t the case, there were meetingsto discuss progress of projects where only one or two of the attendees were ac-tually actively doing something for, and there was still the unending load of newprojects and bits and pieces of work that they keep dropping into my lap eachtime I had my back turned. I was originally working eight-hour days, like mostnormal people, which slowly extended to ten-hour days in the second year, whichextended to the fourteen-hour days in the third year. I was going crazy. It wasbecoming harder to concentrate on the programming, but I tried my hardest. Iblocked out time to force myself to sit down and work on program code instead ofgetting sucked into the endless meetings, I forced myself to use a strict schedulingmechanism to work and to take breaks to ensure I didn’t fall apart at the seamsfrom all the pressure. I tried talking to my supervisor who was, no surprise atall, a foreigner; what she told me was to suck it up and put my heart into it.What hurt me the most was when she started to compare me with a co-workerwho was blatantly slacking off, and said that I should learn to work as well as hedid, considering that his overall productivity was higher than mine.

What could I do? I still had some years to serve on my obligation from thescholarship. I couldn’t just get up and walk away from it all and tell them to suckit down. Reputation is a very expensive thing in those days, less so now sincecompanies are assigned workers based on their abilities and the job’s requirementwith annual oversight from the government with respect to the fit of the worker tothe job. Our reputations as professionals were hinged heavily upon the companiesthat we worked for, since there are so few of them to go round with, the relativeweight of their words become substantially more powerful than to be expected. Ofcourse one could play the global game—I had classmates that did that and nevercame back, not even after the conclusion of the Restoration Conflict—and justgun for the larger multi-national companies out there, like those in Europe or theUnited States, but that in itself is yet another risky strategy that is no differentfrom what we were facing back in the city-state.

So I seethed within. And kept a look out on that vocal group of proto-anarcho-restorists. Their relatability was increasing over time, and as 2014 rolled over, itwas starting to be clear to everyone that they were reaching the point where theycould get a critical mass of citizens and permanent residents interested enough to


cause some serious problems to the status quo that the government was trying tomaintain. Those of us observing knew that they were reaching the critical pointwhen the government suddenly took some. . . interesting actions that while notdirectly discrediting them, did enough damage to their movement through the useof agent provocateurs.

I remembered the day well. I was at home, watching the evening news out ofsheer boredom. I hadn’t been watching the news ever since I got back from mystudies since, let’s face it, the news during that time displayed none of the balancedviewpoints that journalism was supposed to have. Yet another particularly longwork day convinced me that sitting around at home watching the television wasa more productive use of my leisure time than anything else. And it was on theevening news that I heard of charges of public nuisance and illegal assembly werebeing levied against the proto-anarcho-restorists.

I sat upright. It did not sound right to me. “Public nuisance”? “Illegalassembly”? Just what the hell did those people do? Curious, I went on to theworld wide web and looked it up. It turns out that the week before, during yetanother installment of their protest, there was a community event that was beingheld in the same general location as they were. And by “same general location”, Imeant it was on the opposite end of the space that was the designated free-speechpublic arena. The proto-anarcho-restorists made the mistake of marching aroundin the arena and getting too close to the community event, which triggered a quickknee-jerk reaction that they were out to wreak havoc among an innocent lot offolks who were out enjoying a nice afternoon picnic with the particular organisationthat was hosting the event. That knee-jerk reaction included the investigation ofthe police on the organisers of the “protest group”, leading to the final series ofcharges of public nuisance and illegal assembly on them.

I read the articles surrounding the issue carefully. Half of them were vitriolicagainst the proto-anarcho-restorists, saying that they were jerks and meanies whowere heckling people who weren’t there to “listen to their nonsense and was havinga nice afternoon out”. There were others who gave a more conspiratorial slant toit, that it was an act of agent provocateurs to entrap the protestors, to removethe momentum that they were garnering from their increasingly high profile, tomake an example of them against other would-be followers. There were also asignificant few who felt that the whole affair was merely an incident that providedan opportune moment to smash the proto-anarcho-restorists, something that wasnot actually planned the way the conspiracy believers said, but something thatwas as opportunistic as could be.

I did not like what I saw. To me, at least, there seemed to be an invisible line

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that was crossed. I didn’t know what it was that snapped within me, but I couldtell that I was not going to walk away from what I saw on the news unchanged.The sudden reality of the potentially overt oppression of the government on thecitizens hit me like a punch to the face. There and then, as I sat there watchingmore of the news talking about the decisions of the preliminary hearing that washeld, I knew that I could no longer sit there quietly and hope that something willchange.

That was when I decided to be a part of their group, to support these nonamed nobodies to fight back and to bring back some of the dignity that we hadas citizens. To, in some sense, bring back a more straightforward interpretationof the constitution, without all the weasel words and exceptions and conditions.To bring back some sense of belonging, some sense of control, to restore the intentbehind the constitution.

Lucille: So you joined the anarcho-restorists?

Ted: It’s hard to really say, niece. “Joining” meant that there was some kind ofoverall organised movement. It didn’t really work out that way. There’s a reasonwhy they are called the “anarcho-restorists”.

Lucille: You mean the “anarcho-” part of it?

Ted: Yes. I do mean the “anarcho-” part of it. What I just told you is merelythe beginning of the events prior to the start of the Restoration Conflict. You mustunderstand that the Restoration Conflict itself was a pretty bloody affair. It wasthe first bloody confrontation that the city-state had faced since its independencenearly a hundred years ago today. Its ramifications were wide enough that eventoday, we don’t call ourselves the city-state, but the neo city-state.

Lucille: What happened next?

Ted: Well. . .

After I decided to be a part of their group, I did a lot of catch up reading onwhat had been going on. You must understand that during this entire period, Iwas basically working my butt off trying to keep my head above the water, whatwith the work conditions that I was facing. The more I read the more I startedto see that I wasn’t the only person who felt that injustice was being served bythe government on us the citizens. There were just so many things to be angryabout, the flooding of the job market with cheap foreign labour, the raising ofthe retirement age, the enforcement of various policies designed to hamstring the


average citizen—they all added up.

It wasn’t so much the injustice from the terrible policies that were infuriatingother like-minded people, it seems. It was also the fact that each of these policieswere steam-rolled on to everyone without so much as a consultation or referendum,as though the mandate given by the people to the government via the elections wasto be taken for granted. People tried to provide feed back to their representativesin the parliament, but there were no replies, and if any replies were forthcomingto begin with, they were circuitous and explained nothing at best and merelydeflected the question at worst. It was exasperating, at least among the groupthat would form the anarcho-restorists.

But I need to say something in balance. While I said that many of the articlesI read from the world wide web were harbouring such strong annoyances againstwhat was effectively an unjust governing body, there were many who did not see itthat way. They felt that things were going smooth, that nothing was going wrongand that the proto-anarcho-restorists were just being jackasses for trying to upsetthe status quo that was already at its harmonious. It was true at the start of 2014,but the idea of injustice was gaining momentum, albeit slowly.

The proto-anarcho-restorists that were caught in the legal brouhaha were sen-tenced to three months of imprisonment, in addition to a fine of five thousanddollars each. They started to serve their term nearer the end of 2013. For a while,all activities that were trying to highlight such discomforts and injustices slowedto a standstill as each of the potential activist was evaluating the ramificationsof the conviction. It was clear that in the face of the law, the judges were notgoing to actually side the constitution, something that everyone found to be ratherworrisome considering that the judges were the executors of the law itself. Thatthey were blatantly ignoring that was something that needed to be taken intoconsideration—despite appearances, the rule of law was no longer the aegis thatthe citizen could take up to ensure that his rights were being observed. And sincethe police was an extension of the law, it was also clear that they would not be ofmuch use in defending the citizens against the oppression.

Then someone on an anonymous forum on the world wide web wrote a singlephrase: “Armed resistance”. That innocuous looking post spawned a quick thou-sand replies, with each arguing the pros and cons for such a drastic measure. Youmust understand, niece, that the city-state then is the same as the neo city-state—no one could own any form of weaponry, projectile or bladed. Only the police andthe military had access to the weapons of war. As you will undoubtedly realise,someone also started asking on the forums about how the military will behaveunder the circumstance of armed resistance—would they stand by passively and

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watch the change take place, or will they be actively deployed to quell the masses,or will they—in the dream of dreams—join the uprising and help overthrow thesystem that was causing us citizens so much grief.

Much time and effort went into those debates about how it would go about.I am still amazed that such discussions were permissible at all, considering thenature of it. But all these happened during the time before centralised web accesscontrol that was put in place after the Restoration Conflict, and with proper carein choosing one’s method of accessing the particular forums and other web sites,it was possible to evade detection for a long time. It’s funny that despite allthe control that the government seemed to have back in the city-state, they werequite clueless in terms of handling things relating to the world wide web and theinternet as a whole. My guess is that probably they are so used to operating inenvironments that they have absolute control over that they forgot how to workin one where it was more open to all.

I felt that an armed resistance was inevitable. A peaceful means had been tried,and the outcome was clear—any form of dissent was considered to be verboten,or forbidden. It is like trying to hunt a hippopotamus with a peashooter—it willonly enrage the hippopotamus and cause it to charge relentlessly towards the poorhunter, and the end result is a win for the hippopotamus and a loss of the hunter.If we were going to hunt a hippopotamus, we’d better arm ourselves better. Inour context, it meant making a statement that was loud and clear to the pointthat it was impossible to ignore us.

I got in touch with some overseas folks who had experiences with gunsmithingand explosives to learn some improvised firearms techniques from them.

Lucille: Firearms and explosives? Not even knives or anything like that?

Ted: Niece, you see, knives just don’t cut it, no pun intended. In a straightup one-to-one match up with the police when we do our armed resistance, we aregoing to be pelted with all forms of projectiles, from CS gas bombs, rubber bullets,water cannons, and even birdshot from shotguns if things get ugly. It’s not someold fashioned honourable fight thing—we needed to make sure that we show thatwe mean business and are threatening enough to jolt everyone awake and to makethem aware of just how wrong things were.

Lucille: But surely you guys didn’t actually go through with the whole home-made firearms thing, right? It sounds like it wouldn’t work at all.

Ted: Oh. . . wouldn’t you know. . . .


It wasn’t easy of course to build your own firearm. There were lots of materialsto be got, not all of them easily accessible. By the end of the first quarter of 2014,we had a few groups of people who were working closely with each other to planfor a storming of the parliament during one of the sittings to force a coup. Wehad some people working in parliament as spies and scouts to map out whereeverything was, and how heavily armed the various guards were. It was intensework, but those guys did it splendidly. Not only did they manage to get the floorplans and guard armaments and rotations for us, they also managed to stay incover all throughout the time.

We had also received word from someone who knew a general or two in thearmy that was willing to be on our side, something that everyone was pleased withbut was also wary of. You see, while no one ever speaks of it any more, back inthe day of the city-state, there was actually a secret police roaming about tryingto look for such trouble to nip it in the bud before it got out of hand. It was aserious thing. They existed before the whole September 11 terrorist attack fiasco,and had a slightly different mandate before that.

Dissenters. Their mandate before was to look down on anyone who was dis-senting. That was the reason why many of the policies that have turned out to bedetrimental to our own lives were allowed to pass without so much as a whiff ofdiscontentment. A little like how the proto-anarcho-restorists were sent to prison,those who made any sort of noise about the policies with an audience to boot werequickly and quietly taken away to be locked up without trial until they becomecomplicit with the policy or until they grow old and useless, meaning that theyhave lost their audience and their ability to stir up trouble.

With the September 11 incident, the focus of the secret police was transferredto that of the terrorists, or at least, terror organisations which were made up ofreligious fundamentalists with a penchant for high explosives and general mayhem.Thinking about it now, we were similar to them in terms of the use of tactics, butwe differed in one fundamental way—our loyalty was with the constitution and thebetterment of the lives of our citizens, and not some kind of cross-nation religiousrelation the way those terrorist organisations were so fervent about. So in a sense,while they were not really focused to dissenters, which was what we were back inthe day, their focus was still close enough to what some of us were planning to dothat every bit of precaution was needed.

We had our sympathisers. The movement began very underground, like I said,but as the word slowly filtered out, we began to get all forms of support. Somedecided to join in, like the way I did, others helped by creating distractions awayfrom us to ensure that the authorities were always busier with other things than

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to look out for those of us who were preparing for the inevitable armed conflict.There were a few higher ups in the civil service who weren’t happy with the waythings were going and helped with smuggling in various forms of material for us,like the ease of access to various forms of gun powder, and machinery that wouldnormally require tracking and an import license—these machinery were used tobuild the parts necessary for the firearms that we were intending to build.

So in sending those protestors to jail, they had in fact pushed the movementinto the very region of criticality that they were trying to avoid. It happened prettyfast. It helped a lot that most of us had served in the military before as a partof the forced conscription programme that all of us were subjected to—it meantthat the basics for handling a firearm were well understood and that the wholemarksmanship aspect of firing a firearm was also taken care of. The firearms weremade partly from home laboratories, while the gun powder was mixed and packedsecretly by some of the armourers that were under the generals who were on ourside. We couldn’t use the official weapons because it was too much of a hassle toattempt smuggling them out—each piece had a serial number and the paperworkregarding their existence and movment is onerous enough that any halfway decentauditor could sense something missing; it was just that hard to mask it all away.Besides, we weren’t trying to kill anyone per se—we needed the firearms to dealenough damage to dissuade anyone from stopping us in our armed resistance andcoup de etat—we hated the policies, but the people who were running with themwere still, whether we liked it or not, fellow citizens. It is a little like trying toshoot at a brother; it is hard to deal the killing blow.

Lucille: Wow. I read that there were lots of weapons involved, but I didn’trealise that most of the firearms were home-made.

Ted: You’d be surprised how easy it is to make one.

Of course the guns we made were not very accurate. The weapons that wemade through a combination of machining parts and using the 3D printers weremuskets at best, since accurate rifling of the barrels was hard to achieve giventhe clandestine nature of our work. But it was sufficient for our use—we weren’texpecting to fight a real war requiring ranges exceeding fifty yards, and havingsomething that was easy to assemble and use was more important than havinghigh precision. We believed in the number of people we could muster for any suchresistance.


Time wasn’t on our side. Since the imprisonment of the protestors, there hadbeen talk in parliament of passing even more draconian laws with respect to whatand where and how people can say certain things, all in direct contravention ofthe constitution that guaranteed our rights to free speech. In short, the weaselingand conditions were being increased to enforce a yet tougher stance on all of ouractions, depriving us of even the simplest of all rights to raise our concerns and toquestion the reasons behind the increasingly unreasonable and untenable policies.There was also talk that we heard from our spies that the police was secretly beingarmed with assault weapons in case of an uprising. This surprised a whole lot ofus because we had never thought that the para-militarisation of the police wassomething that was within the realm of possibility.

We did most of our planning over covert channels on the world wide web. I havenever met any of the anarcho-restorists in the flesh till the day we all assembledat our various stations to start the resistance. I knew them only by their internethandles, even when we met up. It’s been so long, but I still remember their namesand faces well. Most of them didn’t make it through the Restoration Conflictthough, and that’s why you don’t see many older folks around. It was a verybloody day when it began. We thought it would be done by the end of the day,but it turned out to last for a good two months. That was just ugly.

By the way, have you read Hugo’s Les Miserables? I think you should havea look at that book at some point—some how I find the story it contains to behighly relevant to what we were all trying to do, except of course it is less romanticand ideal as what is written there. It’s not a full scale revolution at that scale—weare a city-state after all—but the underlying principles of attempting to right aninjustice to our own people is the same.

But I promised to tell you about the events leading up to and including theRestoration Conflict. So here’s roughly what happened:

It was November in 2014 when we were all ready for action. I remembered themonth well because of the old ditty that was quite popular then. Maybe you’veheard of it before?

Remember, remember!The fifth of November,The Gunpowder treason and plot;I know of no reasonWhy the Gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot!Guy Fawkes and his companionsDid the scheme contrive,

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To blow the King and ParliamentAll up alive.Threescore barrels, laid below,To prove old England’s overthrow.But, by God’s providence, him they catch,With a dark lantern, lighting a match!A stick and a stakeFor King James’s sake!If you won’t give me one,I’ll take two,The better for me,And the worse for you.A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,A pint of beer to wash it down,And a jolly good fire to burn him.Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

Yes, that’s the ditty. I remembered it in its entirety well. Most people onlyremembered maybe the first five lines of it. A little ominous actually, consideringthe circumstances—the Guy Fawkes who wanted to blow up parliament failedin his attempt and he was caught out and sent to the gallows. We were doingsomething almost similar, though we weren’t actually going in with the intentionof killing off parliament in the literal sense, and funny enough, in the end, we didget caught nearly two months later since the start of the Restoration Conflict.But again I’m jumping ahead of myself. Even though I was an anarcho-restoristback in the day, looking back, I am starting to wonder if all I did was worth it,given the eventual outcome that we got to today. Again, I’m holding off the storyhahahaha. . .

So it was November 2014. The home-made firearms were disseminated qui-etly in pieces to people who were interested in showing up for the storming ofparliament for occupation. There were other groups who were willing to act asbuffers outside of the parliament house to slow down any police forces that weremobilised against us. From the generals and high level civil servants sympatheticto our cause, we learnt that it was highly unlikely that the military would be acti-vated in the case of any such disturbance—the most likely opposing force that we


will be facing would be the riot police, as long as we kept close to our posts and didnot attempt to increase the chaos and mayhem by attacking any bystanders whoare not obviously uniformed personnel. We were also told that in the event themilitary were to be activated, it would require a mandate from the president him-self, and that could be side-stepped by keeping the president away from couriersand messengers that will carry the message of the need from parliament.

The firearms we had were smoothbore breakaway muskets, using stainless steeltubes up to three feet long as barrels. The trigger, chamber and firing mechanismwere made of carefully machined steel, while the stock and guard were 3D printed,as was the gun powder packets. The gun powder that the military armourersprepared for us were packed carefully into packets with a fuze that allowed us tolight up from outside of the chamber. Stainless steel balls used as ball bearings ofaround ten millimetres in diameter were repurposed as our musket ball. It wasn’texactly the easiest weapon to conceal, but we managed to do it somehow. It was aslow weapon, and with the longish barrel meant that we could still get some levelof aiming accuracy. There were doubts as to whether the weapon would work, butwe all knew the answers to that within a week of the whole Conflict. Some of thefirearms were modified to use a much shorter barrel, roughly one and a half to twofeet long to act as a shorter range weapon. Sabots were 3D printed to hold on tosmaller stainless steel balls to act as a rudimentary shotgun. Some of the moreenterprising ones even made double-barrelled versions with both side-by-side andover-and-under configurations as well.

From the discussions on the forums, there was going to be five big meetingpoints. The first meeting point was parliament house itself, where around twohundred and fifty people would attempt to secure the parliament house itself whilethe members of parliament were still inside it. Parliament house itself was builtlike a fortress, and with some help from the spies that were already inside, it wascalculated that it would be possible to fortify the place and hold out for quite awhile. The second meeting point was in the middle of the main shopping district.At least five hundred people were going to meet there and occupy it. There wasn’ta real strategy behind occupying the shopping district itself other than to raisethe profile of the movement drastically—it was one of the most visible places inthe city-state. The other three meeting points were spread out among the housingestates and the business district in the other three uncovered directions in thecity-state to heighten awareness and to draw any police forces away from the maingroup storming the parliament. Some of the folks on the forums were talkingabout doing something more guerilla-like, but the rest of us were uncomfortablewith that since it diluted our people too much—our slow loading firearms meant

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that anything short of numbers would be a serious disadvantage to us when wewent up against the semi-automatic weapons that the riot police were likely to becarrying. Among us were some who claimed to be from the riot police and eventhey were highlighting the issues of not being in numbers.

I was part of the group that was in the shopping district. I was disappointed butunderstood the rationale behind it—even though I was comfortable with firearmsand general infantry tactics, the storming of the parliament house needed thebest we had since it was the operation that required the most coordination andtechnical expertise to pull off safely and quickly, and being only “comfortable” wasinsufficient. On hindsight, it was probably a good thing too that I ended up in theshopping district instead of the parliament house detail—you should know by nowthat of the lot who stormed the parliament house, nearly half of them were badlyhurt when the guards who were not on our side put up a greater resistance thanexpected. That and the eventual stand off which made it all very bloody—butagain I am jumping the gun. Or more likely, I wasn’t there and was starting toget into some kind of speculative territory.

So anyway, we decided on where we were heading and sorted out the logisticsas much as we could. Among us were two rough groups of people. Those withfirearms were the fighters—we were responsible for maintaining the borders of theareas we cordoned off since we were the ones with the actual tools to prevent anyform of incursions. The rest who were not fighters supported the logistics. Wewere planning on occupying the various meeting points for at least a week or moreif we didn’t manage to oust the entire parliament of its current members and forcea rethinking of how the country was to be run. Doing so without any form oflogistics backing for food and water was just a bad idea at best and a terrible ideaat worst, since we would lose in a war of attrition.

It was a bright and early Wednesday morning when the day came. Ironicagain, since it was exactly the fifth of November of 2014 that we all went out toour designated meeting point. I hid my musket barrel by replacing the breakawaypart with the handle of a walking stick while I kept the rest of the parts in abackpack that I was carrying about. I had some of the stainless steel musketballs and the associated gunpowder packets in the same backpack, as well as extrafire equipment for lighting the fuzes. On advice from some protestors from othercountries who had underwent such things, I also brought along some face masksin the dealing of the inevitable use of the various gas grenades.

I got out of my house and took the bus to the subway station nearby—it wasthe quickest way to get to the meeting point. All the way I was getting there, Iwas feeling this strong sense of nervousness, wondering if we were walking into an


elaborate trap by false agents from the government who were trying to lull us witha sense of false security before springing the trap to get all of us in one fell swoopto publicly denounce as as terrorists as opposed to the loyalists of the constitutionthat I knew we were. More importantly, I wondered if the people that I had talkedand discussed matters over the past year on the forums were going to show upjust like the way they promised to, or that only a small handful of us were goingto be present to be a laughing stock of the world as the most pathetic excuse of aprotest group ever. I shook my head gently to get rid of such defeatist thoughtsand told myself that I would go to the meeting place as planned, and will seewhat lay ahead of me. The bus arrived at the subway station and I disembarkedfrom it and walked with a limp towards the subway gentries, my walking stickhelping me make the walk as comfortably as possible. On top of me, the manyvideo cameras were capturing all of the images of people who were walking to andfro the subway, and I was almost certain that someone would notice how phony Iwas looking walking with that pretend limp on the makeshift walking stick, eventhough we knew that there were just too many video cameras in the city-state thatit was practically impossible for the up to date real-time monitoring the way themovies portrayed such security systems—more often than not, such monitoringsystems were consulted after the fact to determine forensically the situation thatled up to the problem that they were investigating.

I limped my way past the video cameras and tapped my subway card at thegantry, which beeped and opened up, letting me hobble my way through. I couldfeel the eyes of the security guard that was sitting at his station just beyondthe gantry staring at me, as though I were some suspicious character that wouldmandate a bag search. It was yet another of those security schemes that wereput in place after the September 11 terrorist events and London bombing—everso often someone would be selected at random for a bag search to ensure thatcontraband goods like explosives or weapons were to be found. I limped on asnaturally as I could towards the escalator, trying my best to avoid the gaze of thewatching security guard.

“Hey you!” My blood froze and I kept on walking, praying that it wasn’t methat they were interested in.

“Hey you! The one with the walking stick!” ‘Fuck,’ I had thought to myself,‘they had discovered me. I’m done for.’

I stopped and slowly adjusted myself as I turned around to look at the securityguard. “You should take the lift down—it’s a little off to the side but it is easierthan trying to make your way down the escalator. Do you need any help?” Heseemed earnest and even friendly, definitely not the demeanour of someone whom

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I was expecting to suddenly turn on me as though I were the criminal that I was.

“I’m fine, thank you,” I replied with a nod and gave the most thankful lookingsmile I could muster despite all the fear that I was feeling before slowly changingcourse towards the elevator. That was the closest shave I have had thus far, andit made me seriously reconsider just what I was trying to do. We were in thecity-state, a high surveillance and low tolerance society, and we were about to pulloff the largest and most dangerous protest that the city-state has ever seen, allunder the noses of the surveillance and security systems. It wasn’t so much as asnub to the people who were in charge but a punch to the face in the nose, shouldwe manage to pull it off. Then I was reminded of what we were willing to fightfor when I looked about the subway platform. There was not a single local personI could see—they were all foreigners of one sort or another. I couldn’t feel thebrotherhood that I felt when I was among my fellow citizens, instead, I felt thedisdain that these foreigners had for people of the city-state. That discomfortingfeeling of alienation was enough to keep my wits about me and to reassure me thatwhat we were doing was for the better, and that the sacrifice was worth it. Hubriswas deeply entrenched, and there was no easy way of moving out of it unless alarge enough shock was delivered to the system. We waited for the system andhubris to correct itself, and we had waited long enough. If the system refused tochange internally, it was time for us to deliver an external shock strong enough toforce it to change for the better.

It was time to remind those in power that the constitution was not a pieceof toilet paper to be trampled all over, that the people, while unarmed, are notpushovers for their every whim and fancy, and that they, the members of parlia-ment, were voted into power by the people for the people, and had their dutiesin serving the people instead of themselves, and that they, the members of parlia-ment, were responsible for the welfare of the citizens first and foremost.

My will thus steeled, I stepped closer to the platform and waited for the subwayto arrive. It was a week day morning and the worst of rush hour was over, sothe subway platform was not as packed as it ought to be. I had taken about aweek’s leave from work—my entitlement no less—and was making use of it for themovement, at least, for the beginning of it. I was sure that by the time we weredone with our taking of parliament house, I would be out of a job, and was readyfor that inevitable eventuality. But I knew that as suicidal as it sounded froma financial perspective, it was the right thing to do. If we were successful, therewould be no issues about our jobs any more, and much of the bad that had beendone to us in the past will be righted.

Or so we thought.


Lucille: So you were scared while getting to the meeting point?

Ted: Are you kidding me? Of course I was scared! I knew I had thought thingsthrough, but it was a first in the city-state. No one was expecting something likethis, everyone was willing to bitch about how bad things were. It took some nonamed nobodies to actually stand up and speak for us, and those of us who wereless no named did not even do anything about it. It was a mix of feelings. Thepatriotism within and the need to care for our citizens over the foreigners swelledup and was in constant tension with the emotion of keeping the status quo andnot stirring up unnecessary trouble—you can see how much of the conditioningthe old city-state had done to most of us. It was a do or die situation—if wehadn’t stood up then, I think we would never have the chance to stand up again,because the next time legislation were passed, we would have been outlawed evenfurther, with more expensive costs to pay. I did think about my work and what Iwas having. Sure, it wasn’t the ideal of situations, but I still had a job! But thiswas beyond the issue of my personal job and personal situation—it was about thefuture!

Lucille: Woah uncle. . . you wanna take a break?

Ted: Sorry niece, got a little too emotional there. You’re lucky. Things nowwere similar to before the Restoration Conflict, but it is in a much controlled state.The checks and balances worked out much better now than before, and that’s whywe are having all these progress even nearly after one hundred years of existing asa small city-state without its own resources. Anyway, let me take another cup ofcoffee and I’ll continue.

Lucille: Sure, uncle. Any time you want to begin again, just go. Or if you’drather I come back another time, you can say so too. I don’t really want to upsetyou too much for the sake of this silly final project.

Ted: Nah, it’s alright. Our side of the story was never told. . . at least, from theside of those of us who were the anarcho-restorists. We were erased from historymostly by the establishment, but sadly, by most of ourselves because it was theonly way to move on from what had happened. But I’ll tell you more about thatwhen we get there. Let me continue about the Restoration Conflict proper.

Lucille: Okay.

I arrived at the stop closest to the meeting point at the shopping district.Limping out of the subway, I carefully made my way off the platform to the exitgantries. I passed through those without being molested, all while under thewatchful eye of the surveillance cameras all around. It was only after I made it

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out of the underground subway station that the number of such “security” cameraswere reduced to something more tolerable. I slowly limped my way to the side ofthe road nearest to the point where we had decided to make our stand. I glancedabout, trying to spot my fellow activists. Remember that we had rarely, if ever,met each other in person to reduce the possibility of the association analysis thatthe police were so fond of using—you’ve probably heard of it in the form of the“contact tracing” exercise when the city-state was trying to contain the effects ofthe great SARS epidemic back in 2003. It’s a similar process, except the dragnetis expanded and there’s a strong legal aspect over it instead of being for the useof epidemic containment.

It was a little easy to spot my fellow activists. Remember that the fighters werearmed with home made smoothbore muskets and shotguns, and the one thing thatwas neigh impossible to hide away that easily is the barrel of the weapon. Onceone had that in mind, it was a case of trying to spot people who were loiteringabout the same general region as I was and seemingly trying to hide away the factthat they had a long hollow metal tube on their person. There were a couple ofloitering people with walking sticks, a couple with those large umbrellas, and acouple who nonchalantly carried the barrel as though it were part of some propthat they were going to use in some kind of production. Spotting the logisticspeople were a little harder, since there was no easy way of identifying them. Wehad originally wanted some kind of identifying emblem designed and deployed,but after throwing the idea about for nearly a thousand posts, it was thought ofas being too risky. The police force may not be that efficient in a proactive way,but even the dullest of them could probably sense a pattern if they see a largenumber of people with the same form of emblem plastered all about them; even ifthey knew nothing about its meaning, the mere frequent occurrence was sufficientfor them to instigate an investigation into the matter, thus drawing unnecessaryattention to ourselves.

I did see a group of people moving some of the large yellow barriers around.They were dressed like regular construction workers, complete with obligatorywork boots and hard hats. The yellow barriers they were carrying about wasthe standard kind of crowd-control barriers that were used; they were effectivelymodular fences made of steel that had their own legs to stand on. Those barrierswere just a tinge taller than waist high, and was hard to climb over in a hurry.I looked about and noticed lots of sandbags scattered here and there, somethingthat I wasn’t expecting to see in the shopping district.

There was a kind of electrification in the air, with so many people bustlingabout. It did not feel as natural as it could be—there was an obvious sense of


forebode that was present. At least, that was what I felt when I started to noticepeople who like me, were trying hard to not be noticed. Then, at around theappointed time for the start of the occupation, a couple of construction workersdressed in reflector wear walked across the road and held out their palms clad intraffic control gloves. The road was a five-laner and was one direction, and it tookaround three of these traffic controllers to slow the traffic down to a standstill.Then, the other construction workers who were carrying the barriers suddenlycongregated and arranged out the barriers across the roads. Some of the driversthat were there started to horn and yell obscenities at the construction workerswho were holding up the traffic, but they remained calm and collected as theycarried on their task.

“Go! Go! Go!” I heard someone yell and caught a glint of a stainless steel barrelreflecting off the morning light. The invisible people I saw suddenly seemed veryfamiliar and all of us made our way quickly to the space behind the barriers. More“construction workers” had made their way out on to the road and were laying outsand bags behind the barriers as some of the fighters who were there first startedassembling their muskets. The traffic controlling “construction workers” smiledand quietly walked back to behind barriers and helped with the mounting of thesand bags.

I made my way to behind the barrier just like the others and was amazed atthe sheer numbers of people who were there. There was a jolly mood behind thebarrier as the fighters brought out their musket parts and put them together whilethe logistics people helped to set up barriers on the other end of the road seg-ment and help set up tentages for the various support functions. Bystanders whowere stunned at the sudden movement of events suddenly realised that somethingstrange was happening and were starting to exit the place as quickly as they could.There were some who seemed to know what was going on and they started cheer-ing on the sides for a bit as the drivers who had stopped in front of the barriersrealised that they were not going anywhere in a hurry. Some of the more abusiveones got out of their cars, their faces red and ready for a fight, but when they sawthe unmistakeable silhouette of muskets against the morning sun, they thoughtbetter of it and went back to their cars, and tried their hardest to reverse out ofthe road blockage, only to face the wrath of other drivers who had gone down thesame road without knowing that something of this scale was happening on it.

I was near the centre of the makeshift camp, and had removed my musketbarrel from the fake walking stick that I had been limping on the whole morning.The gun attachment and stock quickly replaced the fake walking stick handle andI checked the breakaway action to ensure that it was working fine. I had test fired

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the musket before at one of the few deserted islands that were connected by afootpath causeway, and knew what its capabilities were. From my backpack, Iremoved the small fanny pack that contained the gunpowder packets and stainlesssteel musket balls and put it around my waist. Beside me were a couple of otherfighters who were assembling their muskets as well.

“Hey brother, I’m tim587,” one of the fighers said to me as he put his weapontogether.

“tim587? Woah, so you’re the guy with the extensive gunpowder expertise?”I replied, “wasted85 by the way.”

“Hahahahaha. . . I’ve shot lots of fun stuff while I was in the US. wasted85huh, I think I’ve read some of your angsty complaints about how cocked up yourco-workers are.”

“Yeah, about them. . . eh, fuck’ em. This is what we’re about right?” I replied,glad to finally put a face to a forum handle.

“That’s what I would say too. I’m jonah88, used to work at an IT firm, buttoo many of them Indians undercut and got me booted out.”

“Seriously? That’s fucked up brother,” tim587 said as he put the final bitsof his musket back together. Unlike most of our muskets, his looked like a weirdthree barrel combination, two side by side with one stacked below. The one belowwas significantly longer than the other two.

“That’s a weird gun,” I said to tim587. “Is it supposed to be for short rangesor long ranges?”

“A bit of both. The top two are shotgun-like while the longer one below isfor the longer range stuff. I’ve tested this design before—it works quite well. Themuzzle velocity was tough enough to break through flesh targets at around thetwo-hundred yard range for the long one.”

jonah88 gave a low whistle. “I’m not that good with these kinds of innovation,so I just went with the standard design.”

“Standard design’s good enough,” tim587 replied as he stood up with themusket resting on his shoulder. “But I was worried about the lack of short rangefirepower. No idea how they are going to take us down though.”

“You think the military is going to get involved with this?” jonah88 asked,“because if they are, I think we’re fucked over. I don’t think these muskets can doanything to them. Besides, they are probably going to be armed with the usualM16 and M4s and we’ve nothing remotely like body armour here to handle all ofthat.”

“Nah, not bloody likely. This is a civil matter, not something involving anaggressor from the outside, so if the military were to actually be involved, you’d


know immediately that we’re fucked beyond compare, in that whatever we are in-tending to do has exactly zero percent chance of success since the whole corruptionand what not is too endemic that a simple uprising like ours is not going to doanything at all,” tim587 said as he stood up and checked the aim of his weapon.I just nodded my head in agreement.

The place where we chose to make our stand was an interesting one. It was oneof the few stretches of the main road that runs through the shopping district thatwasn’t immediately flanked by tall buildings, terrain that is to our disadvantagesince police snipers could easily take us out one by one with their precision riflesfrom the relatively safe cover high above us where our muskets were unlikely tohit. Instead, we had two fairways on either side, part of the park that existed inthe middle of the shopping district, for one reason or another. It was quite level,making it easy to see a little ahead if anyone tried to charge us from the flanks.For our own safety of course we had set up firing posts in those directions as well,covering all four possible cardinal directions of assault from the police. Some ofthe logistics support people were also flying drones with attached video camerasand were using that as a form of counter-intelligence by scouting ahead of ourchoke point. So far, nothing much had been stirring other than the fact that iratedrivers were finding their morning drives rudely interrupted by a bunch of guntoting people behind barriers of metal fences and sandbags.

You might remember this location, niece. If you had been walking along theshopping district’s main road, there should be a place where a small plaque isembedded in the ground as a memorial. Where that thing is located is where theconfrontation happened at the shopping district. I wouldn’t be surprised if it werehidden in some way or another, perhaps by a strategic bush growing near it orby some kind of fence built around it. Or even having the originally empty fieldsnext to it covered with imposing buildings—I would not be surprised at all if thesewere what happened. You have to rememeber that the Restoration Conflict wasthe event that many would try to forget, the one time in the history of the neocity-state that the control measures for governance failed.

Anyway, plaque aside, back to my story.

So we were sitting there, behind all the barriers, muskets at the ready, but weweren’t actually aiming it at any one or at any thing. There was nothing to dofor the first hour or so because there didn’t seem to be any sort of disturbanceother than us just sitting there and blocking everyone’s way. As the morning wentby and the shopping district stirred though, some of the more curious onlookersstarted to stop by and take pictures of the entire set up with had, and even noticedthe banner that some of the support people had put together as a way of rallying

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those who were for our cause of restoring the constitution and overthrowing thecurrent parliament that was doing nothing for the average citizen and was sellingus away as though we were some kind of slave trade commodity to the foreigners.In short, the banner helped to simplify the cause to the point where anyone whowas walking by and could read it would immediately understand why we weredoing what we were doing. A couple of passers-by joined us at the barricades fora while in solidarity—they shared their stories about how they were marginalisedin their own companies by their own employers, who were unsurprisingly largelyholding work visas as opposed to citizenships or permanent residentships. Therewere a couple that stared daggers at us as though we were complete idiots whowere out to do nothing but to cause havoc to their otherwise hum-drum day—somewere even pissed off enough that they spat in our general direction. They didn’tdare to actually come to close because it doesn’t take much for anyone to realisethat we were sitting behind the barricades with firearms, ready to use it shouldthings start to get ugly.

Nearly two hours after we started our encampment, one of the drone operatorsin the camp gave the warning that the first wave of policemen have arrived. Ac-cording to the description, they were just regular police constables and were notarmed like a paramilitary unit the way the riot police were. There were roughlyten cars’ worth of them heading our way. There was a sense of excitement in theair. First contact with authority! It could easily go in either direction—immediateviolence or delayed violence, the violence being delayed till the riot police assetscan be deployed. Another drone operator sent out the message to us that themainstream media were finally getting in on the action, and there were at leastfive television and radio crews operating just outside of two hundred yards report-ing live about the situation in the shopping district. Someone pulled up a portabletelevision and saw that the media had deployed units to the other three diversion-ary meeting points. But it was worrying that none of the riot police had beendeployed yet. The uneasiness was starting to get infectious—the whole purpose ofsetting up all these other meeting points for us to gather was to draw as much ofthe riot police assets away from the parliament house, where the real action wasto be had.

From yet another drone operator, we heard a confirmatory yell: a red riotpolice bus had been spotted just at the outskirts of the shopping district. All ofus were getting excited by it all—so they were sending out riot police after all! Allthe better for the fighters at the parliament house to pull off what they had to do.

tim587 bared his teeth and grinned. “Looks like it’s going to be a party allaround right, brother?”


I looked back at him and tried to conceal my fear. “Hell yeah! Let’s see justwhat they have going for us.”

That was the kind of bravado that was encouraged back in the army, I remem-bered musing to myself at that time. The type of psyching that was needed toensure that the whole unpleasant business thatwas to come was as easily forgottenas it could be.

The curious passers-by who had milled about earlier seemed to detect a strongsense of tension in the air and had already left the general region on one excuseor another, or at least, that was what I thought to be the case. More likely itwas the set up of a police cordon of some sort that kept the people away fromit all. It was a slow morning, but after standing around without any action fortwo hours, a sudden sporadic silence came about and lingered for a moment, asthough foreshadowing future events. The silence extended into awkwardness asno one wanted to be the first to slice through it with the uncontrolled voice. Theonly thing that was heared more or less clearly was the muted sounds of the birdsthat were rustling away from the trees that they were hanging out on, seeminglyaware of what was to come.

From across the green fields, we could see the forty policemen walking towardus. When they were a hundred yards away, they stopped and one of them (iden-tified as a division commander by one of the drone operators who was followingtheir movement from nearly thiry feet away) raised a megaphone and talked intoour general direction in a cool and calm voice.

“People,” he began, “I am Commander Tan. You are part of an unlawfulassembly with potential possession of illegal firearms. Under the law, I am obligedto tell you to disperse now and surrender your weapons, or we will be forced todisperse you by force. You have twenty minutes to make your decision.”

“Or what? You’ll shoot us dead, your fellow citizens, following stupid ordersto the end without thinking about what they are doing to us?” Someone shoutedfrom behind me. I didn’t dare to look behind—I kept my eyes forward, followingthe movements of the police officers we could see, and fearing for the police officerswe couldn’t. tim587 had told everyone to keep their muskets pointed in the airas much as they could to show that the gathering was not supposed to be violentin nature, but that it could get violent in a jiffy if that was how the authoritiesdecided to go down that path. It was a strong statement to make, and tim587

reminded us that even though the police were not our side due to their loyaltiesand duty, they were still citizens like us, and if we could avoid hurting them asmuch as we could, it would still be an overall win for everyone.

“It’s the system we are going for and those who made it that way, not those

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whose job it is to follow the system that was forced upon them,” jonah88 hadchimed in after tim587’s words.

‘What if they didn’t accord us with the same courtesy?’ I had thought to my-self. “Gentlemen” agreements worked only because gentlemen were involved; if onewas a ruffian, how would the agreement work in principle? But it was not a timefor such thoughts—the tension was at its largest at this point as the police officersand us stared each other down. The questions yelled by the anonymous personbehind me was never fully acknowledged by the police officers who were standingbehind their division commander, let alone answered. The drone operators flewaround the site, trying to identify all the assets that were there. There had beenmovement in the riot bus with the riot police in full gear assembling in front ofit—all one hundred strong—but there was nothing about them to show that theywere going to do anything other than stand there in formation and awaiting fororders. Some of the support staff tried to spot for any police snipers and otherhazards like that by trying to scan quickly at the various directions that the fortyofficers were looking at, but all those turned to naught—the place we had chosento make a stand was indeed a good choice.

The time ticked by slowly. The police officers stood there, in formation aswell, and looked on at us in an unnervingly calm way, while we returned the glarewith stares of our own, our muskets still aiming high and not directly at anyone.tim587 had been designated as the “colonel” of our edge of the square of barriersand he was keeping us cool by telling us repeatedly to keep calm and not aim theweapons at anyone directly to reduce the chance of provocation. On the otherside, where the media were, the drone operators were scouting about trying togain more intelliegence. Behind us and near the centre, someone had turned upthe volume of the television set. The parliament house had been stormed andour fellow brothers at arms were making their way through the building towardsthe parliamentary chambers! We shouted in jubilation when we heard the news.Then, a stray shot flew from nowhere and hit Commander Tan in the stomach.

What erupted was the worst form of chaos that I had seen in my life.

Lucille: Are you alright, Uncle Ted?

Ted: Yeah, I’ll be fine in a bit. . . hold on. Let me drink a bit more of thatcoffee. You must know, it’s a terrible thing to be thinking about things like that.Even though it’s from the past, somewhere deep and far and long ago, once itsurfaces, one cannot simply walk away from it unscathed.

Lucille: Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it some other time?


Ted: Nah, just give me a little bit of time to calm down and I’ll tell you whathappened. It has been nearly twenty years—it’s probably time for me to get itout of my system. This is supposed to be a good thing for me. But like I said,these old emotions are. . . tricky to handle, to say the least.

Lucille: Okay uncle. Any time you’re ready. . .

From nowhere came a whole series of high powered bullet shots and from thecries near the centre of our encampment, all of us knew that a group of peoplehad taken out our drone cameras. The snipers were in place after all, and thefact that they could easily take out our drone cameras told us that the dangerwas much more than we had expected, that our worst fears were realised. Thesupporters quickly ducked as low as they could underneath the tentage, bringingtheir electronic gear as close to the ground as they could by eskewing the makeshifttables that they were using. The police officers who were standing behind theircommander had started to spread themselves out with their revolvers drawn as theriot police sprinted in with their shields to cover up the gaps that were exposed.The fighters among us started to aim our muskets forwards when tim587 shouted“Who the fuck did that? Everyone stand down! Everyone stand the FUCK done!Find who did that and bring him out! Do it before it is too late!”

I looked forwards at the advancing body of police and riot police. They weren’ttaking any chances. Each of the original officers who were at the first confrontationwas behind a riot police officer who had the transparent shield in front of him,acting like an aegis against whatever we might have. The riot police were notarming themselves with anything more than the shield, while the other officershad their revolvers drawn. They advanced slowly and tightly, as though a phalanxfrom the old Roman legion. I could sense the aggression and anger behind the stoicfaces that were slowly revealing more and more detail as they came by. At aroundthe fifty-metre distance, they stopped and held their ground, their weapons stilltrained on us.

Behind me people had jostled and found the culprit who misfired. tim587

glared at the errant fighter and shouted at him.

“See what you have done! That was fucking premature! I told you to not aimat anyone! These muskets are home made—what were you expecting?”

Before the errant fighter could answer, the fifty odd riot police whom we didnot see suddenly sprang forth between those with the riot shields and advanced,firing their birdshot shotguns. The effect was instantaneous—all of us aimed ourmuskets and fired off in the direction in which the shotgun fire came from. They

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were advancing from my side of the encampment, but I was too busy reloading mymusket to pay attention to what the rest were doing. A couple of the advancingriot policemen fell to the ground in great pain as some of the musket balls smashedinto their tibia, shattering them.

“Shoot to slow them down! Shoot to remove their ability to fire at us! DoNOT kill them, I repeat, DO NOT FUCKIN’ KILL THEM!” tim587 screamedover the gun fire. “Keep firing discipline! Row one, reload! Row two, fire! Rowthree, take your aim! Don’t fuck up the order—these are muskets! You need toreload each shot! Aim for the legs!”

I fired my musket as the first row reloaded. Some of the shotgun shrapnelricochetted up the metal fence and hit some of the front liners in the face, but itwas nothing more than a really bad scratch, so they grit their teeth and soldieredon. Once my shot was expended, I broke away the weapon and loaded a newball and charge, and held the small lighter near the fuze when it was time for myrow to aim. We tried our best to keep the firing discipline, but it was hard toconcentrate amid the fire fight. The front line riot policemen had half of themincapacitated, while the other half had retreated behind their colleagues with theballistic shields. Or rather, those with the shields had advanced, with the policeofficers firing off their revolvers in our general direction. A couple of the shots hitsome of our third rowers who were taking their turn in the firing column—it wasnot a pretty sight to see a face just blown to bits like that.

It was a real fire fight, none of that cloaks and dagger stuff. The police weren’tgoing for riot suppression any more—they were going for the kill. It was unlikelythat quarter would be given to us since we had long since passed the invisible linethat separated an illegal assembly to an armed confrontation. The first row wasfiring again, and this time it was harder to knock down any of the slowly advancingpolice officers.

“Fuck,” tim587 said. “This will not do. They will keep on advancing. Every-one, duck when I say so.” I glanced at him from the corner of my eye and sawhim pulling out a familiar looking object the size of a fist.

“GRENADE!” tim587 shouted as he lobbed the high explosive without itssafety pin over the barrier. The fighters ducked the moment they heard the dreadedshout, and none too soon. Three seconds after the shout, the familiar blast of theinfantry killer was heard by all of us. There was a sudden shock of silence as thereverberations of the exploded ordinance made its rounds through the street.

“Fall back! Fall back! They have grenades! Fall back!”

I peeked from behind the front row and saw the police officers breaking theirformation and running back as far and as fast as they could. Near the blast site, I


saw the mangled corpses of two police officers in riot gear. I raised my musket toaim at the retreating police officers, but tim587 put his hand on my musket andshook his head.

I turned and glared at tim587.

“Where the fuck did you get those? And why the HELL did you use themafter saying so much bullshit about not killing them? And why the FUCKINGHELL are you stopping me despite what you did?”

tim587 leant back a little while resting his gun on his shoulder. “Courtesy ofour friends from the army. As for why I’d use it, well brother, lemme tell youthis—if all we were going to rely on was our muskets, we would never have stood achance. Ever. Now it will delay them a whole lot more, and they will have to figureout how many more assets to send in, and that buys the parliament house teammore time, if they ever made it through. And finally, since they are retreating,we have achieved our goal. No need to shoot at them for the time being. Don’tforget that our ammunition is limited.”

“Those fucking snipers have every reason to take you out now!” jonah88 saidbreathlessly.

“No worries there, the same friends we have in the army have taken care of thesnipers. They can’t show their faces for obvious reasons since this is still a civilaffair and not a state of war, but they are out there. We are the distraction fora lot of things that are going around. The only force that matters in this wholething is the parliament house team—never forget that we’re just the distractionsto draw attention and assets away from them. That we have friends in high placeswill help us tremendously, but ultimately, we’re the ones who will be the face ofit all. We’ll get more information of what is going on out there when the newdrones are sent out. I think this will buy us around two hours before they will bedone with their evaluation and send out the armoured water cannon truck afterus. Right now they are thinking it is suicidal to send in any foot-based teams sincewe have grenades,” tim587 chuckled, “but what do they know?”

I looked at tim587 with guarded curiosity. Then I shook my head.

“Yes. We have a cannon and some anti-armour stuff smuggled out of the army.We’re well prepared for this. Did you think we’d just come in with only homemade weapons that are woefully underpowered? I know we have people on ourside, but it is never enough. Just relax for a bit and let the adrenaline flush out ofyour system. Well, not just you wasted85, all of you, relax a little. We’re safe. . .for now. No one will be coming at us any time soon. Regardless, we’ll take turnskeeping a close eye out. The drones will be air borne to cover the larger rangesoon.”

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Lucille: That was it? That’s the Restoration Conflict?

Ted: Well, sort of. Not quite. It was the beginning of a prolonged standoff between us and the police for two months. They never did try to send in aground force again, and tried to send in the armoured water cannon truck, justas tim587 predicted. But by then, the anti-armour rocket was deployed, and itblew a spectacular hole in the vehicle, disabling it. I couldn’t remember if thedriver made it out alive—but I obviously couldn’t just go out there and check onthings. The drones were doing their job, keeping tabs on the people outside ourencampment.

Lucille: Two months? Didn’t you guys have to eat and use the bathroom?

Ted: Well. . .

The truth was, the police didn’t really try their hardest to take us out. For somereason, they seemed to be content to contain us where we were, more or less. Afterwe took down their armoured vehicle in a spectacular fashion, it was starting tobe clear to the police commanders that something was amiss, and that we weren’tjust the rag-tag mob with home-made weapons the way we looked. As it turnedout, tim587 was an infantry officer in real life, and he had the blessings of thegeneral who was sympathetic to our cause to take one platoon out with him to joinus in the meeting place at the shopping district to provide us with the tacticaladvice that we needed. So among us fighters was one section of infantrymenco-mingled among us using the same weapons as we were, together with someof their more standard load out as infantrymen. Among the shadows were twosections of infantrymen tasked with clearing out the snipers from the few buildingsoverhead—they were waiting for the police snipers to be engrossed in taking outthe drones before moving in to neutralise them. The drone operators themselveswere yet another section of infantrymen, this time the signallers, who were usedto operating various types of communication and surveillance equipment.

It boggled my mind to realise the extent of help we were getting to ensure thatwe would succeed in the ousting. But it would boggle my mind more when I heardabout what happened at the parliament house.

It was much later after the Restoration Conflict that I managed to hear thestory of what happened in the parliament house during the time we were keptbusy at the shopping district. The team of two hundred and fifty infiltrators had,among them, two sections of infantrymen leading. They were armed with nothingmore than the home-made muskets and some flash bangs that made a loud soundand cause temporary vision loss from the bright but mostly harmless explosion.


Entering the parliament house was easy enough. The first few fire team mem-bers drew attention away from the guards by deliberately acting suspicious beforethe rest came in and aimed their muskets in the face of the two guards at theliteral front door. Not having a chance to even draw their service revolvers, theysurrendered immediately. Someone came in with some ropes and tied them up, alltrussed up like some turkey, before someone else came with chloroform to knockthem out. With the front door guards taken care of, they quickly progressed intothe main lobby of the parliament house under the commands of the infantrymen.

They spread themselves across the first floor, covering as much of the groundas possible to ensure that no reinforcements from outside the building would enterthe lobby area to surprise them. When the positions were taken and the situationassessed to have low risk of a surprise ambush from the outside, the fire teamstarted to stagger themselves up the many staircases up to the main hall of theparliament chambers. The spies and agents that were working for the anarcho-restorists had even opened up the doors to the rear of the building where muchof the back-end work was done to allow a more complete coverage of the building,leaving no exit uncovered.

When they made their way up to the second floor, they were shocked to findheavily armed riot police officers standing guard in front of the west and east twindoors that opened into the chambers. They kept their distance from the riot policeand kept as closely under cover as they could by staying below the top flight ofstairs that were opening straight into the line of sight. Word was quickly passedto the spies who were still downstairs to clarify with them just what was goingon. The reply that was sent through the fire teams was that the riot police officerswere a new thing that was only implemented at the last moment by the primeminister over a direct line to the police headquarters. The spies said that theywere surprised that the riot police officers were there, and hadn’t known about ittill it was pointed out to them.

There was a general sense of uneasiness among the anarcho-restorists then.Were they walking into a trap that was set to foil them once and for all, or wasit just a fluke where the extra security was due to the paranoia of the leadingparliamentarian? More importantly, where did these riot police officers come fromwhen the ground openings were swept clean without any discovery. Then someonewhispered the possibility of heliopters being used to move the riot police to theroof in order for them to sweep the building literally from top to bottom, thusproviding a stronger defense position for them. A few of the leaders of the fire teammet quickly and silently in the lobby on the first once more to make a decision ofwhether to carry on or to abort. The odds seemed to be stacked against them,

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and it was probably too late to attempt to secure the higher floors before stormingthe parliamentary chambers—unlike those of us who were out in the open at themeeting points, the teams that were storming parliament house did not carry anyparticularly potent infantry weaponry other than the flash bangs and the musketsthey slung on their shoulders.

The quick conference came to a conclusion: they had no choice but to take outthe four riot police guards who were guarding the two main doors, and performan immediate sweep of the next floor above because of the viewing galleries thatwere above the parliamentary chambers—they were effectively two sniper neststhat could be used to pick them off once they had barricaded themselves in theparliamentary chambers with the members of parliament. The infantrymen splitthemselves off into four teams—two to lead two smaller fire teams to secure theviewing gallery while the other two split up the larger reamining forces to take outthe guards and storm the parliamentary chambers.

With the plan in place, they crept back to their positions and conveyed thegist of what transpired to the rest of the fighters. The teams that were to sweepthe third floor waited quickly behind. On cue, the fighters swarmed forward andfired at the guards at the west and east doors simultaenously, injuring them badlyas the third floor sweepers charged up the stairs and threw flash bangs on contactwith the third floor, retreating and waiting for a couple of seconds before formingout on the third floor and gunning for their respective viewing galleries.

The stormers of the chambers were the luckier of the two groups of fighters.They quickly subdued the two guards at each door, and using them as shields,forced open the doors and entered with their remaining members training theirhome made muskets forwards into the chambers where the prime minister stoppedin mid sentence as he was delivering a prepared speech on a new population policythat they were about to debate. There were a coupld of riot police officers hereand there inside the chamber proper, but as they withdrew their service revolvers,they stopped when they realised that the fighters that were entering (their mostvulnerable moment) were shielded by their wounded comrades, and that behindthem had the obvious aim of many musket bores. Confused as to what to do, theylooked at the highest ranking person in the room—the speaker of the house—forguidance, only to find him slowly raising his hands and shaking his head. The restof the members of parliament caught on the cue and raised their hands slowly aswell. The riot police officers in the chamber were quickly subdued and trussed uplike their compatriots on the first floor, and the storming team claimed victory inthe successful first phase of their storming of the parliament house.

On the third floor, the small fire teams were met with unusually strong re-


sistance, with paramilitary police officers in body armour firing at them withsemi-automatic weapons. The infantrymen instinctively went into prone positionand ducked for cover and fired back as fast as they could with the muskets theywere armed with—some of them also pulled out their service pistols and attemptedto snipe with them, clearing a bit more breathing room for the others to thin downthe police forces with their muskets. They lost nearly half of their men from thesemi-automatic fire of the rifles within the first ten seconds of contact. Desperate,some of them threw the remaining of their flash bangs at the direction in whichthey heard the gun fire from before staggering their charge, with those who werein prone position providing cover fire for those advancing as the pistollers kepton their attempts at sniping. By the time the smoke and light cleared, the fight-ers found that they had temporarily disabled nearly half of the opposing force.But it wasn’t enough—they were already done by half. With a hoot and a yell,they made their final charge against the armoured riot policemen and engaged inclose quarters combat. Their rifles in the way, the riot policemen were quicklyoverpowered by the nimbler fighters, their rifles taken away and quickly replacingsome of the muskets as the alternative weapon. As more of the fighters gainedsemi-automatic rifles, the riot police officers slowed their efforts to struggle andfight back. Those who could came by and tied up their opponents while thosewith the semi-automatic weapons regrouped to push for the viewing gallery.

The doors to the viewing gallery were unlocked, as expected, and in it werethe signs of a comand post for the paramilitary wing of the police force, completewith spare ammunition, communications equipment as well as tactical maps. Theinfantrymen looked at each other with glee and knew that they could now holddown the parliament house until their commander came down with real armyreinforcements, clandestine of course.

Something similar happened with the other team for the other viewing galleryas well. So just as the fighters in the chambers declared their victory in taking overparliament, those in the viewing galleries were happy they managed to fully securethe obvious entry points for the viewing gallery. But they were not completelysafe till they were relieved by the clandestine army supporters. Leaving the non-infantrymen in the viewing gallery with a couple of semi-automatic rifles andplenty of muskets, the remaining infantrymen from the third floor assault teamregrouped and rearmed themselves to sweep the final two floors of the building.

Meanwhile, the leader of the parliament house storming team stood forth fromthe chamber assault team and started to address the stunned members of parlia-ment.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you are confused and possibly enraged at

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just what occurred here. I have no doubt that there are many of you who mighteven think that we are committing treason here, assaulting this seat of govern-ment of our dear city-state using such violent means. I assure you, it was neverour intention to take this recourse—it is unnecessarily bloody and the sacrificesinvolved are beyond what can be imagined. You may think then, why are we soadamant to do what we have done? Or even, what exactly was it we did.

“Well, let me tell you this. We represent the vengeance the citizens of thiscity-state that wants to rip all of you limb by limb for being the oppressors youare. We represent the justice that you have failed to uphold the day you sworeyourselves in as members of the parliament that governs this city-state of ours. Wesymbolise the righteous indignation that had been forced under severe constraintsand pressure to fester into this violent uprising. If, now, you think as well as youdid when crafting the policies and laws that harm us citizens while hiding behindthe facade that it is for our good, you ought to be seriously wondering what willyour fates be.

“I will tell you, we are not like you, emotionless and without empathy. Wedon’t want you dead, but we want you to restore what was rightly the soul andspirit of this city-state—we demand that you restore the constitution back to itsfull glory, without the weaselling and exceptions and conditions that you have putin over the past decades to fulfill your own self interests at the expense of thecitizens.”

The prime minister faced and glared at the leader of the fighters with eyesof fiery anger, the kind that often accompanied a man who was used to havinghis way. “You violently charged your way into here and claim to represent thecitizens. Need I remind you that all of us are voted as members of parliament bythe people? What mandate do you have to demand us to do this stupid request?”

The leader returned the glare with the cold stare of one who had stared into theabyss and was not afraid of what he found there. Calmly, he raised his musket andfired a shot into the leg of the prime minister. The musket ball flew at high speedsand smashed its way through the tibia of the prime minister, and the sudden lossof his standing support caused him to fall quickly to the floor in surprise.

“The mandate of Heaven. It is your arrogance that is your downfall Mr PrimeMinister. You have forgotten what the constitution means. Mr Speaker, may wehave a reading of the Constitution and have each of its statutes re-ratified, withall associated exceptions and conditions reviewed in depth, and to be struck outon the basis of not being in the spirit of the drafting of the Constitution?”

“Well,” the speaker of parliament began as calmly as he could, “it is highlyirregular, but we. . . can do that via debate? We do have a quorum present, and


if. . . ah. . . legitimacy is what your. . . group is going for, perhaps we shouldfollow this order of business?”

All the fighters shouted in agreement, much to the surprise of the speaker ofparliament. He cleared his throat and was about to speak again when the leaderinterrupted one more time.

“Sorry for the interruption, can we also enforce that the members of parliamentare now operating on the basis of their conscience and not based on whatever pre-stated party whip?”

“Considering the intent behind your. . . petition, yes, I think I will agree tothis. All members of parliament are now required to debate and vote on the basisof their conscience. All party whips are no longer in effect.”

“Excellent Mr Speaker. What say you, Mr Prime Minister?”

“You will not get away with this,” the man said as he clutched at his bleedinglimb.

“I never intend to. In fact, none of us ever intend to!” Shouts and hoots ofsupport and jubilation erupted from the fighters all about the parliament chamber.“It is not for us that we did this; it is for our people and our city-state that weare doing this. You should remember this for the rest of your life.”

“And now, none of you are leaving this building until the Constitution hasbeen restored to full effect, with all the contradictory and exceptional laws thatcircumvented the Constitution struck out from the legislation. We will provideyou with food and drinks to keep you going, and you may use the toilets of course,but none of you are leaving till justice is restored.”

Lucille: That. . . that’s not something you made up, right?

Ted: Why would I make up something like that? Go ask any existing survivorsfrom that fire team, if you can. They’ll corroborate.

Lucille: No, I don’t mean that. It just sounds so. . . impossible.

Ted: Times were weird. When you have an angry enough mob, anything ispossible if they are organised enough. We were fairly organised in a fashion, whichallowed us to finally take a stand, brutal thought it may be.

Lucille: They willingly stayed in place for two months?

Ted: Not really.

Some of them, I think the cabinet members or those who had the most tolose when the constitution was restored to its original form tried to activate evenmore of the paramilitary police to come in and mount some kind of rescue. We’retalking SWAT level stuff, more like the ones who were using the semi-automatic

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weapons instead of those who were going after us with the birdshot shotguns.But by the end of the week, the general who was sympathetic to our movementhad managed to convince a few other generals about the merit of the movement,invoking something to the effect of “we swore to protect the consitution and sincethe constitution is currently being trampled upon and these people are trying torestore it, it is therefore our duty to protect them from any form of oppression.”It was also said that the general had also wryly commented that the presidenthadn’t contacted them to give specific orders to the contrary, and therefore theywere bound by law to upkeep. With that support came relief in the form ofadditional reinforcements of soldiers, this time in full uniform and gear unlike theclandestine groups that were helping us, who came and stood guard shoulder toshoulder with the rest of the anarcho-restorists, while other soldiers helped withthe logistics.

It helped a little that the public that was initially ambivalent to the causewas rapidly polarised by the reports from the media, with some siding with usrestorists and others siding the incumbent parliament and all its flaws. While wewere the ones who started the whole movement to force the parliament to rescindthe unconstitutional actions they had taken thus far, it was this new group ofpolarised people that caused the true Restoration Conflict.

It was the end of the second week for us out in the shopping district choke point.I didn’t go back to the office any more since there was no need to, consideringeverything that had happened. Word had been sent from the parliament houseabout the lock down that had occurred, and images of the military fortifying thepositions around the parliament house were enough to inform everyone just howserious things were. Our numbers had swollen from an influx of nearly anotherthousand or so supporters for the restoration of the constitution, with them doingmost of the chanting and shouting and the whole nine yards relating to regularprotesting. Except this time, there were fighters on their side, meaning us, aswell as above-board support from the military. The police were not to be seenbeyond a relatively safe four hundred metres away, thanks to the heavy presenceof infantry soldiers decked out in full combat gear hanging out with us fighters onthe peripheries of the barricade. Ever since we launched that anti-armour weaponat the water cannon vehicle, they police hadn’t dared to send any other armouredvehicles in our way. The medics were allowed access to the scene of the carnageto remove the injured and the dead, and it was, on the whole relatively peaceful.

Until the swelling of the numbers that is. On our side, it felt good to finally


see the repressed and oppressed fellow citizens rallying together towards a futurethat we all believe in. But what happened was that a strong opposition from theconservatives had been grown ever since they discovered what was, according tothem, a case of treason against the city-state. They too had amassed a numberof their supporters and started gathering where we had first taken up position todivert police attention away from the teams that were storming the parliamenthouse. While their numbers started off smaller in the beginning, by the end of thesecond week, they two had hit numbers that were almost as many as we had, orperhaps more. They stood around fifty metres away from us further up the road,keeping their distance because of both the overt military presence that we hadand the fact that we were still armed to the teeth with the muskets. The fencesthat were first there had since been moved aside to ease mobility for the logisticspeople to bring food and water in to the encampment, leaving behind only thesand bags which were also rearranged a little when it was clear that we weren’texpecting any form of reprisal from the policce in a long while.

So instead of a small group of fighters armed with home made muskets and arag-tag group of professional infantrymen supporting us, we are now talking aboutthe potential congregation of nearly three to four thousand people, each ready togo for the other’s necks from the vastly different points of view.

tim587 had cautioned me that time when I thought that we were going tohold the road indefinitely. “wasted85, this is only the beginning. The defeat ofthe police merely buys us time for the inevitable—it only beat back the officialpeacekeeper of the civil society, showing him that he wasn’t dealing with some runof the mill ruffians. It was easy; you have us from the infantry here to help youwith that.

“But this next fight coming right up—it will be bloody. Much more bloody,and worse compared to the face off with the police, for it will be the meeting ofmobs. And we are the incumbent with many armed people. But both sides arefilled to the brim with the high explosive of fanaticism, primed for the eventualdestruction of themselves. And all it takes is that one spark the way the face offwith the police started—one side injuring the other under a highly tense situation.

“What I’m trying to say is this: we may actually need to shoot to kill this timeif we were to live through this entire incident. And the people who we need tofire our weapons at are the very people who are still blinded by the tales that thegovernment had been feeding them, the ones that are part of the many we hope tosave through our movement and our actions taken over the past couple of weeks.Be prepared for that eventuality, brother.”

tim587’s words can true just a little bit past fifteen days. The two mobs

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of people were unusually unruly that morning—the news caster nearest to theparliament house had reported that word had been sent from the house to saythat the negotiations were moving forward with hiccups here and there, but itwould take some time before the whole process of unsullying the constitutionwould complete. The news caster also said that the anarcho-restorists—the termthey had given us ever since they had learnt of our movement from the firstword from the occupied parliament house—were still in high spirits and willingto continue the occupation until the job has been completed satisfactorily by theparliamentarians, despite the hiccups that were reported.

On our end, some people started whooping it up when they heard the news, andlike a viral infection it spread throughout the entire anarcho-restorist contingent,with everyone cheering and shouting that our brethren in the parliament housewere still holding strong, and that they were confident it would turn out well forus. That struck a nerve with the neo-conservatists who had gathered opposite ofus, and being pissed off, they started to shout obscenities and slogans back at us,insulting us in as vulgar a manner as it could. Then a few of them started walkingtowards our direction and like an unintentional criticality, the rest of their mobfollowed in the same direction and made their way towards us. On our end, usfighters were standing guard, a little slackening considering that we weren’t goingto be up against the police in the near future, and a few of us quickly noticed thesudden danger. jonah88 and I shouted at the mob to stay back, and remindedthem that we were armed, but they just didn’t listen. Fearing for the safety ofthe encampment, we started training our muskets in the general direction of theapproaching mob. tim587 noticed the disturbance, and grabbed a nearby loudhailer to bark out commands to us.

“Fire teams hold your position! Do not fire unless I tell you to! You peoplenot on our side, I am reminding you that we are armed and if we feel threatened,we will open fire! Back off now and don’t test your luck!”

But the mob of neo-conservatists were beyond thinking—they were a runawayself-sustaining throng of angry advancing people. The mob on our side walled uptowards the fighters behind the sand bags—they knew enough to not get in theline of fire our of muskets should it get to that stage.

I watched in horror as the mob of the other side kept on their relentless advance.Some of them started picking up random pieces of debris from the road they wereon, brandishing those debris as though they were going to use it. tim587 mutteredto himself behind me, condemning the first bastard who had the cojones to tossthe first stone.

They closed the distance. Forty metres remained between us, then thirty. At


that point tim587 shouted through the loud hailer “You have been warned! Youare now getting too close. Turn back or we will be forced to open fire!” Thewords, deafening from my position, fell on deaf ears. They kept on coming in, andtim587 gave us his orders with his quavering voice.

“First row, aim! Second row, prepare! Infantry aim!”

The first stone was tossed at the distance of twenty-five metres from our closestbarricade, and an avalanche of discharging firearms reverberated throughout theshopping district on command. In front of us, two whole rows of the opposingmob fell from their injuries, with those fired at by the semi-automatic rifles ofthe infantrymen experiencing penetration to the poor souls who happened to bestanding behind them.

“First row, reload! Second row aim! Third row, prepare! Infantry fire at will!”

I drew a bead with my musket at the figure that was charging towards us at fullspeed. He was a young Chinese boy, probably no older than twenty years old. Helooked dishevelled, and his eyes had that fervent look about him. In his hand wasa piece of rock that he was about to lob when I squeezed the trigger. The musketrocked back a little as the charge in it detonated and fired off the musket ballstraight into the boy’s femur. The effect was instantaneous but brutally slow—one moment he was running forwards towards us, and the next he had planted hisface firmly into the ground, with the leg that I had fired upon flung backwardsand high into the air as his forward momentum flipped him.

After three successive volleys of fire from our side, the mob seemed to get themessage that we weren’t fucking around, and those who were outside of the thirty-metre mark started turning around to run back. But those few reluctant retreaterswere met by the full inertia of the mob that demanded they move forward. Sighingto himself, tim587 signalled for the fighters to stand down and gestured at our ownmob to surge forth to provide the force to push back the other side. I remembergetting out of the way as quickly as I could from the second row of fire that Iwas on to let people from our side charge in to push back the neo-conservatists.tim587 motioned us to take up flanking positions and keep our muskets on theready in case the mob successfully pushed our own people back. And nearly anhour after it first began, it ebbed away when the criticality of the neo-conservatistswere held in check by our own side.

This went on and off every couple of days throughout the entire two months wewere there, except each time it came, the stakes were a little higher than before.Towards the end of the entire two months, we were up to fighting each other withall manners of guns as the generals that weren’t sympathetic to our side startedthrowing their own personnel and equipment on the side of the neo-conservatists.

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Many fighters, including me, traded up our muskets for some of the semi-automaticrifles that were available later on, when it was clear that the protesting mobs wereturning into a kind of proxy war for those who were in power.

I’ll admit that I probably hurt, maimed and possibly killed more people duringthose two months than I had ever over the rest of my life.

Lucille: But if you were so hard core then, how did you manage to leave thewhole episode unscathed?

Ted: I didn’t leave unscathed!

While the occupation force at the parliament house were getting the constitu-tion fixed and what not over the past two months, the rest of us were doing ourbest to keep the movement alive by the continual occupation of our various barri-cades. As I told you earlier, the beginning was relatively benign, with the policebeing the primary opposing force, then they retreated when they realised we hadinfantry weapons beyond the home made muskets that were using up till then.Further on, when news of the parliament house occupation hit the city-state’smedia, the heavy polarisation occurred and many of the people of both sides ofthe issue came down to the various barricades to support their various sides.

I told you the story up to the point of our first skirmish with the neo-conservatists.It was necessarily bloody, the kind of reaction that one was expecting in order tobring some order to a mindless mob that they were at that time. But it had the sideeffect of escalating things slowly but surely, and in our case, the neo-conservatistsstarted to fortify themselves with home made weaponry, including firearms andimprovised explosives. They set up their main encampment around three hundredmetres away from our central tentage at the shopping district, as far as our videodrones could tell. Their own supporters had come down in droves, and some of theother military personnel not on our side had taken up their cause and attachedcouple of companies of infantrymen on their end, armed with conventional semi-automatic weapons. At that point, the entire police force was effectively neuteredsince there was no way they could do anything to deal with forces that involvedthe actual military with actual military hardware. All they could do, as I wastold by some of the people running the drone surveillance, was to keep a quaran-tine border around the five major barricades to ensure that none of the potentialviolence within spilt out of their respective zones.

In many ways, the civil state of the city-state was on hold at that point,


despite a lack of a proclamation of martial law by the president, whom the restof our teams were doing a good job at keeping away from all communicationschannels. I wondered if that man had been killed outright by our own people—but jonah88 told me that it was not likely since we, in some sense, needed thepresident to be alive to provide his blessings for the restored constitution. “Afterall,” jonah88 said with a grin, “the president is the ‘lawful custodian’ of theconstitution, whatever that means.”

The skirmishes, as I said, were heating up across the time throughout thewhole two months of the occupation of the parliament house and the barricades.The media had started to call the movement the “Restoration Conflict”, referringto the key disagreement between the anarcho-restorists and the neo-conservatistswith respect to the treatment and restoration of the constitution. The peak of theRestoration Conflict occurred on the last day of the two months. A spokesper-son from the occupation at the parliament house had met up with the mediarepresentatives under the watchful eye of the military guarding the parliamenthouse and reported that the constitution has been restored through the marathonsession with the members of parliament, where all legislation that weaseled andimposed unnecessary and discriminatory exclusions and conditions on the consti-tution proper were removed as cleanly as was possible. There were some otherminor points that would require a lot more wrangling to sort out and re-codify,but it was something that had minor consequences upon the constitution. Whenthe media asked about the state of health of the members of parliamnt after theforced sequestration over the two months, the spokesperson replied that they werea little malnourished but did not come to any harm, except for the few who weretreated by field surgeons for their injuries sustained during the initial storming aswell as the various attempts earlier in the occupation of escape.

Then the spokesperson said that the members of parliament will be releasedfrom the parliament house in batches, and that the parliament itself was dissolved,and a new election will be taking place within three months once the electoral com-mission was convened to handle the logistics of the whole process. The scene cutover to the president’s chambers, where a beleaguered president smiled phonilyacross his face and anounced his support of the newly restored constitution, andformally confirmed the dissolution of parliament and activated the electoral com-mission to convene and prepare for an election.

The news fragment was broadcast over the city-state, and all of us who werecamped out for the protests and demonstrations heard it over the televisions thatwere set up here and there specifically for this purpose. On our side, there wasa shout of jubilation: the efforts and sacrifices we had done over the past two

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months had finally turned up an outcome we were happy to live with, while theneo-conservatists let out a collective groan of anger and anguish.

Then someone from the neo-conservatist camp shouted “Fuck ’em over thedisloyal anarcho-restorists!” and a Molotov cocktail made its way from the frontlines of the neo-conservatists towards no-man’s land. It missed the unoccupiedfifty metres, but landed right at the sand bags, its explosion of burning petroland glass injuring one of the fighters who was just taking a quick break. His facewas hit by the glass fragments while his skin flamed from the burning petrol thatwas doused over him. It prompted an uncontrolled scream of pure pain and likea piercing alarm in the middle of the night, it roused the anarcho-restorists toaction and we all leapt to our feet. The neo-conservatists were also whipped intoa frenzy, and the mobs started to clash towards each other as those armed withfirearms were trying to take each other out to give the unarmed mob on their sidea better chance.

I was firing from behind a sandbag. Since we were armed with semi-automaticrifles at that point, there was no longer any need for the strict fire disciplinethat we had to follow with the muskets, and time587 stepped back as the fireteam coordinating colonel and worked on the tactics and strategy of deploymentof us fighters. jonah88 was next to me, and we covered each other as best aswe could against the onslaught of bullets and shrapnel that were heading in ourdirection. We were doing quite well—each shot we fired seemed to find their mark,either disabling a fighter on the side of the neo-conservatists by hitting him in theshoulder or arm, or by stopping anyone from thei end that was trying to lobexplosives in our general direction.

That is, we did quite well until I was shot in the shoulder myself.

It was stupid. I was trying to take a shot and leant out a little too far fromthe sand bags, and exposed a little too much of my left shoulder. A sharp shooteron the neo-conservatists’ side, possibly a team sniper in the infantry, fired a highcalibre round which blew its way into my shoulder. Up till now, I cannot forgetthe momentum that I felt during that short period of impact. There I was tryingto take aim, and then the bullet knocked me off my aim, and it took me a goodtwo seconds to realise that I had been hit, and that I was bleeding quite profusely.I felt nausea hitting me, and I involuntarily crumpled down behind the sand bag.jonah88 was still firing away when he saw that I was down. Retreating behindthe sand bag, he dragged me towards the rear while motioning for others whowere further behind us to take our firing spot. After dragging me back for nearlyten metres or so, our supporters took over and dragged me onto a field gurneybefore evacuating me closer to the centre of the encampment, where our medics


and command centre was. I was trying my hardest to stay awake, but it wasgetting harder and harder over time as I was losing blood quite rapidly, and theshock of getting hit was starting to get to me. The last thing I remembered beforeI passed out completely was someone telling me that they had to send me to thehospital as soon as possible because the round fired at me had basically torn offmost of my shoulder, and the blood loss was something they couldn’t actuallycontrol given the equipment they had out there.

Lucille: So you passed out at the largest fight after getting shot?

Ted: Yes, pretty much. When I woke up, I found myself in a hospital withintravenous tubes sticking in me delivering food and painkillers. They managedto save my arm and kept it reattached as best as they could after reconstructingas much of the missing parts of the shoulder as best as they could, using varioustitanium struts and screws to hold everything in place. I didn’t know what tomake of it at that time since I was as loopy as I could be from all the painkillersthat I was doused with. I knew that I was out of a job by then—two months awayfrom the job while taking only a week’s worth of leave was equivalent to goingAWOL—absent without leave. And given the nature of my work, it was as goodas being fired.

Lucille: Then what happened?

Ted: I was in the hospital for a while, maybe upwards of two to three weekswhile my condition was stabilising. There was little that I could do except to watchtelevision, and it was from there that I learnt of what happened after wards. Aspromised, the members of parliament were released and a new election was to becalled for. The rules regarding campaigning and the election process were changedquite drastically. Boundaries for the electoral constituencies were redrawn fromscratch without caring about the past gerrymandering, and the voting systemwas replaced with one that involved in a run-off as opposed to the first past thepost, where instead of declaring the plurality winner of the first round of votingas the winner, the top two pluarlity winners were to be faced off with a run-offvoting to determine the eventual winner via a majority. The massive en groupevoting blocks were also torn down back to regular-sized constituencies to preventpoliticians who were voted into power purely through piggy-backing on strongercandidates. This is of course the system that you are now familiar with as thevoting system of today.

Lucille: How about you folks in the anarcho-restorists? What happened?

Ted: Powerful people of the neo-conservatists demanded that the anarcho-

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restorists be tried under the law of treason, but the president stalwartedly grantedimmunity to all of us under the context of us trying to rally against a system thatwas so corrupt that the only way to force change was to use force itself. Thissurprised us because we had always thought of the president as a lackey of thegovernment for the most part, but now he was showing that he had the spine todo what was right. The more cynical of us felt that he only did this because hedidn’t have a parliament as a strong political base to support anything else, andthat the people were the current power holders, and therefore it was more usefulfor him politically to pander to us. In anyway, we were granted immunity and thatwas that. But of course, no good deed should go unpunished. For the next tenyears since the climax of the Restoration Conflict, there had been reports here andthere of former anarcho-restorists disappearing under mysterious circumstances.Some were reported to have suicided, others just went missing one day whenthey went out—they just never returned. Rumours had it that some of the morepissed off generals who had supported the neo-conservatists were very unhappywith the immunity that was granted by the president, and had gone on a crusadeto remove all those who had supported the anarcho-restorist cause. tim587 andjonah88 were also missing as far as I could tell from the chatter on the forumsthat we used to keep in contact with each other after the big confrontation. But Istopped following the forums around five years after that day I got shot—by thenthings had stabilised, and while the anarcho-restorists had won a victory, it wasPyrrhic in nature. The neo-conservatists bunkered down and slowly brought backtheir original system of governance after around twenty years, and we have whatwe have now. But what can we do—the anarcho-restorists are no more.

Lucille: Why’d they leave you alone?Ted: I was just a follower. I might have been a fighter in the Restoration

Conflict, but I was still mostly a follower. The vendetta was against those whowere leading, because they knew that if those who lead were still around years afterthe fact, they would still have enough charisma to actually call forth the old forcesto come together and threaten the way in which things were done. And that’swhy you don’t see many of us old people around any more. Now your grandmaand mother are probably something altogether different.

Lucille: Why so?Ted: Heh. I think you should probably interview them to find out for yourself.

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Lucille sat at her desk and flipped through the transcript of her interview with Un-cle Ted on her touch-board surface. The persacomputer had done a commendablejob in transcribing the recording of the interview, and she had just spent the lastthree hours looking through the trasncript and annotating it as best as she could,identifying some themes and expressions that she thought were representative ofwhat he had said. His words had an interesting effect on her—while their yarn-likequalities were undisputed, they held a certain reality in them that was hard todismiss as just tales from a curmudgeon trying to impress or intimidate the young.

‘But then again, Uncle Ted isn’t that old. He’s like what, sixty something thisyear?’ Lucille thought to herself as she made a few more notes here and there onthe opened up document on her touch-board surface. The dormitory room wassurprisingly quiet, well, not that surprising, since it was the weekend afternoonand most of the other residents had already gone out for their usual activities.Lucille loved this time of the day the best. It was one of the times where she hada peaceful environment to do some thinking for herself, and given the character ofUncle Ted’s interview, it was exactly the thing that she was looking for. She hadplanned for a conference with Mr Lim on Monday during his office hours to discusssome of the stuff that Uncle Ted talked about to see if the kinds of themes thatshe was seeing was actually valid. But first she needed to do a quick summary ofher findings to send to Mr Lim ahead of time to ensure that there was a strongenough context from which the discussion could take place. She was also expctingJustin for the evening to take her out for some light dinner followed by a walk.

School was starting to take its toil on Lucille, and she knew it. Despite havinga relatively light work load for the final semester of college, Lucille had foundherself working harder than the other semesters she had. The engineering classeswere progressing swimmingly, with their consistent work load playing their partin maintaining some semblance of sanity, but the history class was taking up somuch of her time, requiring her to do more reading up than she had planned todo. Lucille felt that compulsive need to know more about that bit of history that

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few were willing to talk about, and she didn’t know why it was so. Perhaps itwas her way of trying to be faithful in taking the primary material from UncleTed, whom she thought had kept his story to himself for the past forty odd yearsbecause there was no one who was willing to hear it and make sense out of it.

The silence of the successor government of the neo city-state with regards tothe whole Restoration Conflict was astounding to Lucille. She had no doubtsthat Uncle Ted’s interpretation was correct, but there were some parts that felt asthough something were missing. And all her readings thus far had kept on showingthat there was a distinct lack of information on that period, save for those thatMr Lim and his students have put together. Uncle Ted’s explanation had a typeof convenience in it that was disturbing, as though the world during that time wasoperating in a very deterministic fashion. ‘That’s it,’ Lucille thought to herself.‘The whole thing that Uncle Ted described was too clean and convenient to soundcorrect. How could an entire movement that involved thousands of people stayunder the radar for so long, even developing alliances from within the military andproducing illegal firearms without being detected in what was effectively a highsurveillance region?’

Lucille pondered upon that for a while as she absent-mindedly flicked the doc-uments on her touch-board surface here and there. The persacomputer detectedher idleness and quietly kept the more sensitive things that the was working onaway from her immediate interaction so as to prevent an accidental amendmentthat she wasn’t intending to make.

Some knocking on her door jarred Lucille back to reality. It was the distincitveknock of Justin. “Come in!” she said and the door unlocked itself with a click andJustin walked in, smiling again. He walked up to Lucille and gave her a hug frombehind as she sat there.

“Still working?”

“Was. I think even the touch-board surface could figure out that I was nolonger in my productive zone—it had kept my important stuff away from me.”

“That’s cute. . . ready to go?”

“Okay, but let me put everything aside for now,” Lucille replied before flickingon the touch-board surface. The machine smiled (how was that possible?) andreturned to the same surface that Lucille was on as she was working on the historyproject. She pushed all the materials into the folder and pushed that on to theonline storage system. Once the touch-board surface gave a notification on itssuccess, she stood up and walked towards her wardrobe.

“You know, you look very cute in those tiny boy shorts,” Justin said as hewinked at her lecherously.

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“Oh you perv, let me go put on some pants. Don’t leer like that or you’regoing to stay like that forever!” Lucille replied in a teasing way as she slipped intoa pair of khakis.

“Awww, now you’re all engineer-y again,” Justin said with a tinge of sadnessin his voice.

“Well, you’d rather I walk around in nothing but my boy shorts?” Lucillereplied playfully, knowing full well his reply. “Anyway,” she continued, withoutwaiting for the expected response, “where are we going for dinner?”

“Cafeteria Five?”

“Oh, we’re doing French today huh?”

“Yes. We’ve not been to the Arts Faculty canteen in a while. It shouldn’t betoo packed today, considering everything.”

“Alright then, let’s go.”

After the dinner at the French canteen, the two love birds made their way tothe garden surrounding the small lake that was in the middle of the campus. Itwas one of their favourite places to go for a walk in the evenings due to its generallypicturesque outlook and the availability of shelter in case of rain or heavy sunshine.

The garden was a gift from a group of alumni who had made it big with theircomapnies in a couple of engineering fields spanning from aviation to informationtechnology. When dedicating the newly built garden some ten years ago to theuniversity, they had said that the reason why they decided to donate a gardenand the lake to the school instead of yet another new wing was that “there werejust too many academic buildings and too little places for people to be people asoposed to relentless studying or research machines, and that the truly creative andproductive needs to be reminded that they can only reach their full potential ifthey actually take the time to give themselves a break or two to recharge theircreativity”. It probably helped that the alumni who donated were also the onesthat almost all the professors and lecturers had pegged as being most unlikely tosucceeed since they were always seen to be loafing about and goofing off insteadof burying themselves in the books the way that their contemporaries were.

Lucille loved the garden and its associated lake. It reminded her of a formof beauty that was away from carefully engineered human constructs, the type ofbeauty that came from an unending iterative process of the interaction of simplerandom processes, something that no engineer in his or her right frame of mindwould ever suggest. There was also a copious amount of greenery, something thatwas quite missing in the neo city-state ever since the population count hit a new

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high of nearly ten million people. Space was rare and heavily commoditised, andany space that had no economical reason to exist were forced to be removed. Soin a sense, the garden and its lake in the university was a kind of black-eye thatthe cheeky alumni delivered, something that was completely within the nature ofthat group of rich successful people. That they had enough money to buy a pieceof land and develop it for something that had “no economical reason to exist” hadthe sense of rebellious nature that the university students loved to emulate, andLucille was no different from the rest of them.

Lucille and Justin walked along the bricked road, hand in hand, enjoying thesubtle quietness of the evening as the sun made its final trip across the sky andtowards the western horizon. The reds and oranges that permeated the sky wasbreath-taking, and Lucille found herself staring up involuntarily to soak up theephemeral view before it would all go away in the blink of an eye.

“Lovely evening it is, isn’t it?” Justin asked as he stood closer to Lucille.

“Yes. It always amazes me to see the sun like this.”

“So you’ve said before,” Justin added as he gave her hand a little squeeze. “Sohow was that history project going along?”

“It’s moving alright, I think. I completed that interview with Uncle Ted andjust went through the transcript. I’m going to discuss it with Mr Lim on Mondayduring his office hours just to make sure I’m on the right track.”

“Wasn’t your Uncle Ted involved in the Restoration Conflict as an anarcho-restorist?”

“Yeah. Wait, how did you know? I don’t remember telling you much aboutUncle Ted.”

“You forgot that day when we were having lunch outside when your uncleshowed up unexpectedly and struck up a conversation with you and I asked himwhy his left shoulder seemed a little crooked and he said something about it beingan injury during the Restoration Conflict he sustained from some of the friendlyfire on the side of the anarcho-restorists?”

“Oh right! Now I remember,” Lucille said. ‘That can’t be right, friendly fire?Uncle Ted told me that he was shot at by a sniper from the neo-conservatists.Just which is the truth that he is telling now?’

“So he told you some cool stories that you could use in your project?”

“Yes. He told me some interesting stuff. I’ll have to cross-reference his storieswith some of the analysis before I can make enough sense out of it for the projectitself.”

“Cool!” Justin said. There was a sudden awkward silence that descendedbetween the two of them as they walked on through the garden, hand in hand

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still, as the sun dipped itself low on the western horizon. The standing lamps thatlined the walkway slowly increased their intensities to counter the drop in lightintensity, and soon the paths were illuminated by the standing lamps only.

The two of them continued the walk in silence, each detecting in their own waythe subtle change in the ambience. It seemed that something unspoken had beensaid and there was suddenly a newly discovered barrier that no one could figureout what exactly it was, and more importantly, how it can be removed.

“You know,” Lucille said in a matter of fact way, “I think I’m feeling a littletired. Going through that transcript was more tiring than I thought it would be.I still have some other points that I need to work on before I meet Mr Lim onMonday, and should sleep early tonight so that I can work on them tomorrow.What do you think if I said we should just call it a night?”

“Okay, I’ll walk you back to your dorm. I’m feeling tired myself for somereason. Not sure if it’s because of the mid term exams, or something else, butyeah. Let’s head on back then.”

With that, the evening ended and the two of them went back to their variousdorms.

Monday came by quickly enough and Lucille found herself standing outsideof Mr Lim’s office back at the history department, fidgetting uncomfortably forno reason whatsoever. It was mildly discomforting to be talking to a lecturer,especially about research work that is not of an engineering or scientific nature.It wasn’t that Mr Lim was unapproachable—he was probably as approachableas any academic can be—but that it wasn’t often that Lucille was using thoseprofessor office hours; most of her interactions with regards to officer hours werewith the teaching assistants, people who were either graduate students or moresenior students, in short, folks who weren’t professors.

She was early for her appointment. Her time slot was at ten, but the doorremained closed even at five past ten. ‘Probably the kid before me was still in adeep discussion with Mr Lim,’ Lucille thought to herself as she hugged her wristnervously. She had spent the better part of Sunday going through her notes onthe transcript of the interview with Uncle Ted, as well as reading through as muchmaterial as she could find on the Restoration Conflict that was available fromthe neo-net engine. The pieces held together, as far as she could tell as she waswrestling with the text, but it was hard to tell for sure until a discussion withsomeone else. She had thought of bouncing off the ideas of Justin, but ever sincethat Saturday evening, she felt that there was an invisible barrier that existed

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between him and her with respect to this whole Restoration Conflict business.While she was ambivalent about the correctness and wrongness of the anarcho-restorists and the neo-conservatists, she could sense that Justin had a strong dislikenot amounting to outright hatred of the anarcho-restorists for some reason thatshe didn’t feel like finding out, and that bias made it hard to have him look atwhat she discovered in an objective way, the usual manner in which he wouldtackle most problems. That discovery of the barrier between he and she was anew revelation for her, something that never quite cropped up before. There wasa nagging feeling at the back of her mind that it was probably not a good thingin the long run, but at the moment it was not something that was of her primaryconcern.

The door to Mr Lim’s office opened at roughly ten past ten, and the studentthat came out of it looked flushed and hurried. She looked carefully at him—helooked unfamiliar to her, so he was unlikely to be part of the class. He had anair about him that reminded her of an older person, someone who had been inacademia for a while, the look of a graduate student. But there wasn’t time tothink more because from within his office through the open door, Mr Lim hadcalled out “Lucille? Are you there?”

“Yes Mr Lim, I’m here. Should I come in now?”

“Yes please, sorry for the delay—was having a discussion with a graduatestudent on some of the findings that he had discovered while going through someof the newer textual evidence that happened during the early twentieth century.Fascinating stuff, that was, but the authenticity was suspect given what we knowabout that particular era. Anyway, come on in first and close the door behindyou.”

Lucille entered the office and gently shut the door behind her. Mr Lim’s officewas a smallish room that he shared with another lecturer in the history depart-ment, and that was clear from the obvious separation of the room along the in-visible line. The side that wasn’t Mr Lim’s was pristine and nearly empty, withfew books here and there, with a customary touch-board surface and chair, bothseemed as though they weren’t used in a long while. On Mr Lim’s side though, asingle book case dominated nearly a quarter of the wall space that was available,and on it sat many books that had yellowing pages and esoteric looking titles,things that one wouldn’t normally see these days since much of the material hasbeen digitised and made easily accessible over the touch-board surfaces. Lucillecouldn’t see any dust on the book case—either the books were referred to oftenenough that they didn’t have the time to take on that much dust, or that MrLim was a fastidious cleaner. In any case, the latter seemed unlikely given the

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relatively messy corner of Mr Lim’s work area. The only place that was not messywas the touch-board surface itself.

Mr Lim sat in front of his touch-board surface, flicking away material from theprevious meeting into a folder and pulling up the folder that Lucille had sharedwith him over the email. Lucille looked about her before sitting down at the chairopposite of Mr Lim at the touch-board surface in a tentative way. A few minutesof silence elapsed as she waited for him to say something, any thing. A bit bored,she started to look about the room more.

The room itself was built like the other parts of the building—an ugly rough-walled concrete structure that seemed to begin life as a nuclear bunker than anacademic’s office. The windows seemed to be placed as an after thought as theywere probably better described as slits of five inches cut into the foot-thick con-crete and sealed with inch-thick glass. If the intent was to provide an illusion ofopenness, it instead enhanced the effect of being trapped and oppressed. Lucilleshuddered to herself as she made her observations.

“First time visiting the office hours of someone from the history departmenthuh, Lucille?” Mr Lim said as he scanned through the summary that Lucille hadsent him.

“Huh? Right, yes, Mr Lim. How’d you guess?”

“The window. It’s always the window. The first time I was issued this office,it was also the window that got me confused. Why a five-inch wide window ininch-thick glass hewed out of a foot-thick concrete? What was the aim? Whatwas the purpose? I thought it was some architect’s idea of a joke, and evenup to today, I feel the same way, despite being told what they were really for.But anyway, I’ve read your summary and checked out the transcript. That’s aninteresting interview you have there, probably the most interesting interview Ihave seen yet with respect to the Restoration Conflict. It’s probably the mostaccurate description I have ever read, almost as correct as what really happeneed.Except of course he had to change some details of the story to protect himself andeveryone around him. Still, an excellent piece of primary source. I’m surprisedyou could get a hold of this.”

Lucille looked at Mr Lim confusedly. “I. . . don’t understand. What do youmean by the ‘most accurate description’ you’ve ever read?”

“Oh! I guess there’s no sense in hiding this from you since you already havehalf the story. That jonah88 in the interview with your Uncle Ted? That wasme.”

Lucille sat upright with a start and stared dead at Mr Lim to see if he waslying. His earnest eyes returned the stare with a look of amusement.

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“You look surprised. Don’t be! I’m not pulling your leg—I am the jonah88

in the interview. But I haven’t talked with your Uncle Ted in a very long time,not since the aftermath of the whole Restoration Conflict, and frankly, I don’tintend to. It’s part of the amnesty deal that was made with us, that we nevercommunicate with each other ever again on this matter.”

“Amnesty deal?” Lucille asked in yet more confusion. So far, the discussionwith Mr Lim was turning out to be fraught with more questions and queries thananswers and clarity.

“Yes amnesty deal. I’m not at all surprised that your Uncle Ted did not talkabout it. It wasn’t the proudest thing of the anarcho-restorists of that time, atleast, those who are still alive now. Maybe you can find some other primarysources that can tell you the story from a completely different perspective andyou can see for yourself why it all came the way it did. Let me give you a hintin the right direction: despite what your Uncle Ted has said, it is a fact that theneo-conservatists were the eventual winnes in the entire Restoration Conflict. Thisis not something that you will find in the books and the materials that we talkabout in class, hence the final project.”

“The purpose of the final project,” Mr Lim continued, “isn’t so much as tolearn how the field work is done per se, but to allow each of you to learn thetruth for yourselves without having any of us trying to force feed you all withthe information. Every historical account has its biases, no matter how much thewriter tries to eliminate them—everyone cannot see their own blind spots. Couplethat with the need for absolute control over information by those in power, youwill have historical accounts that are always advancing one agenda or another,sometimes even at the expense of the veracity of the truth that is purported.

“This is why the value of the primary source comes in. It provides a form of biasthat is easily controlled and accounted for—the bias is not from interpretation ofthe interviewer but the one who is contributing the story, that is, the interviewed.Your summary of the interview is good, but it lacks the insight behind the biasesthat the interviewed might have. Now that I tell you that I was that jonah88 inthe story, and told you that at the end of the day, the neo-conservatists were thereal victors, you have some semblence of a bias that you can seek from within theinterview transcript and recast your observations from that perspective.”

Lucille furrowed her brows and thought hard. Something did not add up inher head, but she wasn’t too sure what it was. She looked at Mr Lim, trying tofind a concrete form of the idea that was floating in her head. A minute passedby, and it suddenly dawned upon her.

“How do I know that you are telling the truth?”

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Mr Lim chuckled. “You don’t, or at least, not with the incomplete pictureyou have now. That’s why you should look for more primary sources to get theirperspectives of the same situation during the same era. Books aren’t going tohelp you much here because of the massive amount of sensitivity behind the entiresituation, so your best means of getting to the truth is through your primarysources, hopefully from the neo-conservatists side or someone who is neutral ofsome sort. The more different viewpoints you can get, the clearer the apparenttruth can be. And that’s my advice for you.”

“If the books are unreliable, why should I be using them in my report anyway?Can’t I just just the primary sources?” Lucille asked.

“All sources are unreliable, be they people or books. But the unreliability isbased on different assumptions. For a properly researched piece of writing, onemust not discount a piece of work just because it is unreliable—there are oftendiamonds hidden among the dirt that comprise the books. Here’s another morepragmatic perspective: if those books were as useless as they were, they would noteven exist now through the passage of time, don’t you think?” Mr Lim pausedhimself and looked at Lucille. She just sat there, and stared at the touch-boardsurface’s documents that were spewed everywhere. The words resonated withinher, and when mixed with the plethora of colours from the strewn documents, anoverall sense was starting to come together in her mind in a coherent way.

“Okay, Mr Lim, you’re saying I’m on the right track, and I should get my otherprimary sources to be of somewhat different alignment, and that I should also hitthe books before synthesizing my own analysis of everything?”

“Yes, that sounds about right. Glad you realised what I was saying,” Mr Limsaid with a smile. “You know, you make a much better history student than thehistory majors I am having. That’s all I have for you as a recommendation. Doyou have any more questions or issues you’d like to discuss with me?”

“No, not really.”“Okay. Make an appointment with me after the next interview you get?”Lucille nodded before standing up from the chair to leave the office.“Oh by the way, don’t tell your Uncle Ted that you’ve met jonah88. It would

endanger all of our lives. What happened was in the past, and for some of us,there are certain views on reality that we hope don’t get shattered just to ensurea proper functioning of the self.”

“I understand,” Lucille said, wondering if she really understood what Mr Limwas trying to tell her before opening the door of his office and exiting.


Lucille: Hi Grandma Ruth, how are you doing?Ruth: Spry enough still. How’s your mother?Lucilla: Ma is doing great. She’s been working on her new book or something—

I haven’t talked with her since about a month ago. You know, school work andall.

Ruth: Heh. How’s that boy, Justin, right?Lucille: We’re doing okay.Ruth: Glad to hear it. So what’s this visit about? I read that you said you

needed to interview me for some class project or something?Lucille: Oh, that’s right. I am taking this history class at college and we have

a final project regarding the Restoration Conflict, and I need to interview threepeople for use as primary sources.

Ruth: And so you thought me, your ma, and your dear old Uncle Ted wouldmake good candidates because we lived through that particular era?

Lucille: Wow, Grandma, how come your response is the same as Uncle Ted?Ruth: You’re too easy to read. Besides, the moment you used the phrase

“Restoration Conflict”, it is clear who you can even approach as primary sources.No guesses needed. So where would you like me to start, or do you have a list ofquestions that you’d want me to answer?

Lucille: Anywhere you’re comfortable to begin with, really. The lecturer sug-gested that we listen to first-hand narratives before drawing our own conclusionsand observations after the fact during the transcription.

Ruth: Hmm. That’s an interesting way to put it. Usually there are somequestions or queries that people want answered when they do these interviews.But okay, whatever you need for your project.

I know you want to know more about the Restoration Conflict, but it is hardto just talk about it without knowing what happened before, or at least, when the

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circumstances leading up to it are not known. By the time the whole thing blew upthe way it did, I was already past fifty, sort of like an old fart compared to thosewhippersnappers who were going about yelling and shouting and shooting anddoing all the things those young punks did during that time. Anarcho-restorists,if I remember correctly. Terrible name. It removed the romantic mystique of whatit was that they were going for, for sure. But I am skipping a lot of things here,right? So let me begin where I am most comfortable.

I’m sure by now you have probably read or heard a lot about what caused theRestoration Conflict proper. Or how it was all the government’s fault in screwingaround with the constitution to short change the citizens, or how everything was somercenary that the average Joe was suffering miserably from all the bad policiesto the point that it was necessary for a bloody revolution of some sort, excepteveryone was too pussy to actually do a real revolution the way the Russians andChinese did back in the day. But the truth is necessarily murkier. The fact wasthat the government’s hand was forced by the very citizens who later claimedthat the actions that were taken by the government were designed to cripple thecitizenry.

I started working when I was past eighteen, some time in the late nineteenseventies or early nineteen eighties. Back then, there were few of us who got tocollege, and the concept of “college” itself was a very elitist thing. There was onlyone university available, the Polytechnic University of XXXX, the very same onethat you are studying at now. I was one of the lucky few who had gotten mygeneral certificate of education from my secondary school, as well as a vocationalcertificate for office administrative support, or as you might call it these days, a“clerk”. We didn’t have all these fancy touch-board surfaces you kids use thesedays—we had to use typewriters to transcribe information on paper, and emailwouldn’t be invented till nearly ten years later. Computers were starting to comeinto play, but they were massive machines that we read about here and there inthe more fancy newspapers from overseas like the UK or even America, but wenever really had the chance to look at one of them, let alone actually use one theway you folks do these days.

I was working at a factory then as a support clerk. I went to work daily viathe public bus which took about an hour from my house in the housing estates tothe factory itself that was out in the western side of the old city-state. The dailycommute was long then because the subway system wasn’t constructed yet—therewere discussions at the national level about building such a network, and someof the infrastructure has been built, but none of them were operational yet sincethere were many parts to connect together. There were also the issues of funding

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and technology—there were no local companies that could supply the signallingand trains needed for the subway system, and therefore there was a lot of workinvolved in getting support from various foreign companies. I remembered thatit was a big thing while I was in school; the radio was always reporting on theoutcomes of various negotiations in the process of building the subway.

But anyway, the factory I worked at, it manufactured tyres. Not tyres forcars, but tyres for heavy equipment, like those trucks and pick-ups. Back in theday, there was a fledging truck manufacturing hub in the west side to providethe medium sized trucks that were needed for the many construction sites inthe city state where the housing estates were being built. Lots of infrastructureconstruction during that time, probably more than now, but you wouldn’t knowit since they were spread all throughout the city-state. So the factory I worked atmanufactured tyres, large sized ones, heavy duty stuff. I was the clerk that helpedkept the records for the company. We hired lots of locals—foreign workers weren’texactly something that was to be considered, since the cost of actually shippingthem in was way too high. Only the managers and higher-levelled executiveswere likely to be foreigners, what you might call “expatriates” back in the day,as opposed to the derogatory term of “foreign talent” as used by the anarcho-restorists.

We all worked very hard. The pay wasn’t much, but everyone was facing thesame kinds of problems. So we all worked very hard. Even though the official timewas set at eight to six, we often ended up working late through till around eightin the evening, and it was nothing to do with the busy work that was commonjust before the Restoration Conflict. We got our over time of course, but it wasjust necessary to work that hard to get things done. It didn’t seem like a chorebecause everyone was working as hard.

The government then made a promise to us. They said they would help craftpolicies to help us folk, to make it such that we would not suffer as much despitehaving to work so hard. They created various pension schemes for us, a mandatorysavings programme where we would contribute a percentage of our salary intothe national savings fund which the government would invest to grow it withguaranteed interest. It was a scheme that faced a lot of inertia in the beginning,because people were worried the mandatory contribution meant less take home pay,which during that time was a potentially hardship inducing problem since manypeople were living from paycheck to paycheck. I was young then, so all thesepolicies didn’t affect me directly, or rather, I didn’t care that much about them.I had graduated with some vocational certification, and was happily contributingmoney to the household fund. All I knew was that times were hard, and the


government was doing its best to help us through.

As the years gone by and I got older, the policies were updated to help us along.During the early 1990s, when I turned thirty or so, the policies were updated tohelp those of us who were intending to get married to have enough funds for anapartment as well as giving us some monetary support for our first three children.The policies were timely because it was the start of a rather dry spell of foreigninvestment. Many companies that had set up shop in the city-state were forced tomove elsewhere due to labour costs. I had also been promoted from support clerkto that of an executive secretary, and was transferred to a different subsidiaryof the company that bought over the tyre business that I was working at. Yourmum was born some time in the middle of the 1990s. Times were still hard, butwith an apartment to live in, as well as having your grandfather with me and allthe support from the various policies that the government created, we still livedrelatively well. Of course we didn’t have anything very luxurious or fancy like carsor expensive furniture, but life was made comfortable, much more comfortablethan the ten years before.

Was the government doing anything wrong during that time period? No, defi-nitely not. Times were hard, the city-state had to prove itself amid the fast growthof the recently industrialised countries in the region. If we were to even fall behindby a bit, I’m sure we would never be able to rebuild the momentum—that washow keen competition was. Large foreign companies were eyeing the region forcheap labour for their factories and some of them were even looking for places toput their regional headquarters, the command centre for all their operations in theregion itself. The government did a lot of good there to ensure that the city-statewas the premier location for all these headquarters, and even though our labourpool was a little more expensive compared to the region, we made up by havinga more versatile worker pool in that we were all guaranteed to be literate andwell-trained to handle any of the more skilled tasks that were involved.

By the time the two thousands came along, the labour market had changed.Mind you, during that time, I was fast approaching forty or so years old, so roughlynear my mid-life. I was still a secretary at the company that held the tyre companythat I started with, but this time, the company had itself been bought over by anew investment firm from America. Even though I was a secretary, I worked moreat the level of chief clerk, where I coordinated all the secretarial staff as well asthe many administrative support assistants under them to get the various reportsof the company’s health compiled and distributed among the various executives.It was a good job that made extensive use of my background of the company thatI had accumulated over the years. But there was a subtle change in the make

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up of the clerical staff—there were many more Philippine administrative supportassistants than local ones. I know because I had to compile the reports fromhuman resources for the bosses to review, and in those reports, it was stated thatthe numbers of locals sending in resumes for the positions were low, more like nomore than five percent of all applicants. And this was not something that justcame about recently since there had been a steady decrease in numbers over time.

Among the resumes that were not from the locals, a large number of them werefrom the Philippines, and they had good credentials to boot, with a reasonablesalary request. The local ones often demanded a starting pay of nearly threethousand dollars a month, an unreasonable number since the job of administrativesupport assistant wasn’t even a professional-level one, and that most of them whoapplied were fresh graduates from the various vocational colleges without anywork experience whatsoever. Human resources had complained about the gradualcomplacency and lack of quality from the pool of local applicants and had nochoice but to focus almost entirely on the non-local applicants.

It was of course during this time that the first disgruntled noises from the soon-to-be anarcho-restorists were heard. They started small, innocuous comments onsome open forums and blogs. The first articles that were sent were polite but firm,and had an air of despair about it that was still easy to empathize with. Butslowly, as these complaints started to gather momentum, more and more acridlycrafted articles appeared, first on blogs and forums that were publicly viewable,then on underground blogs and forums when the government started to enact lawsto curb the seditious behaviour under the pretext of maintaining the peace andharmony that we had been having since the early days. The repercussions wereswift, many of those who were mouthing off without thought or care in backingtheir statements were sued by the city-state as being agents of sedition, and largenumbers of them were sent to rehabilitation centres to rehabilitate their attitudes.

Lucille: Sedition?

Ruth: Yes, sedition. It may sound harsh, but let’s face the realities. Timesweren’t exactly rosy during that time period. The government was doing its best topatch the situation for us, and then you have this group of people throwing monkeywrenches by making lots of these baseless arguments, most of which may soundharmless on the get go, but are in actuality very harmful because it underminesthe social cohesion that was needed to ensure that everyone is willing to put asidedifferences and work together towards bringing up the economic output of thecity-state.


Lucille: Okay. I’m sorry grandma, just a bit confused there. “Sedition” isn’ta word that I’ve heard used in that way before.

Ruth: Well, now you know. To be fair, there are no known recent instanceswhere sedition is a problem, so it is unlikely that you even have the chance towitness just how bad it can get.

If anything, I would even go as far as to say that the precursor of the wholeRestoration Conflict found its roots during those formation years that I was talkingabout. Those who were entering their twenties at the end of the first decade ofthe twenty-first century had never undergone any of the hardship that those of ushave, and it was starting to show. Lucille, when I say that they really don’t makethem like they used to, I mean it. We’re talking about a new crop of lazy bumswho want to come out of university and make a million dollars by the time theywere thirty—just how unrealistic that can get?

I remember this incident well. But first, some more background. By the timethe first decade of the twenty-first century was up, I had switched jobs. Thecompany that I had worked for over twenty years had sent me for training on andoff for human resources, and they were on the verge of going bankrupt just at thattime. I was rehired at a different company, an IT firm specialising in developingsystems software for the public sector, as the head of human resources. It wasn’tthat much different from what I had been working on at the other company, exceptthis time I had a title to match the job that I had been doing for the past decade.

The IT firm was like your typical infocomm company that specialised in build-ing software—always a high demand, and always having a need for ever morelabour. Like before, we saw lots of resumes coming in from fresh graduates withalmost no work experience demanding the kind of salary that someone with fiveyears of experience would get. Obviously those never managed to reach the in-terview stage. This time though, as an IT firm, we got a whole lot of Indianapplicants. And those were some seriously impressive resumes—we had a truck-load of them to consider during each month, but we were always needing more ofthem.

Except that those anarcho-restorists to be made such a loud stink about the lossof jobs that there was the sudden introduction of a foreign hire quota throughoutthe entire city-state.

It was a disaster. On the one hand, it seemed like it was a good idea, sinceit helped to protect the livelihoods of the locals as the state-level quota meantthat there was a hard limit on the total number of foreign worker highers. But on

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the other hand, you have situations like my firm then that we were desperatelyneeding more workers, but the local’s standards were completely sub-par to whatwas actually needed. It was a busy time for us, so we didn’t have any choice butto hire some of the locals that were the least bad of the lot. And the companystarted to bleed from within. We were paying these local graduates around twentypercent more than the Indian hires, and yet the productivity of these locals wereno more than sixty percent of their Indian counterparts. I remembered havinglong shouting matches with the bosses with respect to the types of hires we weregetting—we couldn’t just waltz in and hire more foreign talents because the quotawould work against us, costing us more in terms of fines and penalties.

I remembered some of my bosses were so disgusted with the system that theyended up allying with a few other companies in the industry to lobby to thegovernment for the relaxation of the quota system for our industry due to theextenuating circumstances. I helped to prepare some of the numbers and reportsthat were used in the talks with the government to convince them of our direneed. The talks went on for quite a while before the government realised just howimportant our infocomm industry was and started to relax the quota for us.

The anarcho-restorists then were livid—they felt as though they were severelyshort-changed and betrayed by their own government.

I didn’t think so then; and I still didn’t think so now. I mean, if they werereally good, they could easily compete with the rest of the labour and earn theirposition through their own merits—why should they be hiding behind the thinlydisguised protectionist policies?

My bosses were delighted at the easing of the quotas for the infocomm industry.It meant that we could finally fire a few of the underperforming but highly expen-sive local hires and replace them with cheaper but still more talented people fromelsewhere, not necessarily from India. I helped to do the sifting and head-hunting,as well as writing up the hire contracts.

Lucille: There weren’t any form of draw back whatsoever?

Ruth: I’d be lying if I said there were no drawbacks. Some of the folks wehired had a tough time trying to speak and use English to communicate, but sincemost of our hires were technically folk, being able to communicate effectively inEnglish was not the highest priority compared to actually having a good workingrelationship with the rest of the people on the team; that’s the reason of havingproject managers after all, since those are the ones who were to go round andensuring that needs and other pieces of information are communicated accurately.


Lucille: Didn’t that make you feel uncomfortable, Grandma Ruth, that theenvironment that you were once comfortable with was now filled with so manyforeigners?

At first it was uncomfortable. I had thought of it before, especially during thetransition years before I became the head of human resources. But then the moreI thought about it, the more I agreed with the government’s policy—economicgrowth was necessary to ensure that all of our standards of living will rise overtime. I looked back at the nineteen eighties from where we are now, and I seethe drastic improvement in lives that many of the so-called anarcho-restoristsdo not see. They were idealistic fools, always wanting to resurrect the ancientconstitution without actually thinking about the repercussions that would comefrom discarding the pragmatism that the government was taking over the past fortyto fifty years to ensure a steady growth and relevance of the city-state with respectto the world. It pains me to no end each time I see an anarcho-restorist “takingthe floor” and literally shouting all these naıve bullshit romantic interpretationsthey had without actually realising the limitations that the original documentshad with respect to the advancement of society.

Thankfully your mother wasn’t like that when she was young and just enteringthe work force. I would have disowned her if she were as batshit crazy as yourUncle Ted. Bah! Joining the anarcho-restorists—a whole load of bullshit. He wasjust a lazy ass who didn’t know the importance and value of hard work, and justwanted a quick an easy way of getting rich, and failing that, he just went aheadto blame it on the government of the city-state despite the fact that they were theones who created the economic wonder that allowed him to flourish back in theday.

Anyway, it was in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first centurywhen the “anarcho-restorist” movement became a big thing. I had smelt somethingamiss during the run up to the big event—my leave staff were reporting an unusualamount of leave applied by the twenty or so local workers in the company, eachspanning roughly a week or two at around the same general time period. I didn’treally think much of it since those twenty or so local workers were like at most threepercent of the entire firm’s head count. It was when I heard it on the news thatthose idiots had stormed parliament house that I went back to double-checkingthe leave that were applied and approved to find the pattern.

It was a morning like any other on the day in which news of the storming ofparliament house broke. I had gone to the office with the intention of working

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through a stack of documents that were emailed to me just the evening before,when suddenly my boss popped his head in my department and asked me if I hadbeen paying attention to the news. I had looked at him in confusion and repliedno, asking him what the significance was. He had this irate but fearful look on hisface that I didn’t quite understand then, but insisted that I head to the pantryto watch the news that was broadcasting there. I shrugged my shoulders and justplayed along—one doesn’t just say no to one’s boss most of the time, besides Iwas also curious at just what it was that got him so obviously spooked.

So I followed him to the pantry where the thin-screened television was mountedon the ceiling. I was surprised to find the pantry packed at that time of the day—itwas no where near lunch time, and therefore it wasn’t supposed to be that full ofpeople. Nonetheless, almost everyone on the same floor were there, and they wereall staring at the “live” broadcast news that was being shown. I looked up andsaw a telescopic short of the parliament house from probably five hundred metresaway, with a muted voice of the newscaster having a voice over the whole setting.I found it hard if not impossible to actually hear what was being said, and so Irelegated myself to reading the ticker-tape news that was below it. After readingit for thirty seconds, the story started to form within my head.

Apparently, a group of armed men had stormed the parliament house, andthat there had been rumours that some of the police officers that were supposedto be guarding the parliament house that day due to a sitting of parliament wereseverely injured by gun fire. In addition to the assault on the parliament house,there had also been reports of large thousand-people gatherings at five or sixdifferent locations scattered throughout the city-state. Some of the eye witnesseshad claimed that it all seemed to be very coordinated, almost military in style, andthat long barrelled guns were seen in the hands of many of the men. The policecommissioner had appeared on television to assure the public that the police forcewas in control of the situation, and reminded everyone to stay calm and avoid theplaces that had been reported to having this large group of organised gun-men.The reporter had asked if the identities of the gun-men and the protesters wereknown, and the police commissioner replied that there were some suspicions thatthey were investigating, but at first glance it didn’t seem to be the case that therewas a terrorist attack. The sheer scale of the eruption also prompted the reporterto ask the police commissioner if the police assets were capable of handling thesituation or if the military would be involved, to which he answered that so far,things were still within control of the police force, and that he was going to keepit under the control of the police force as much as he could considering that it wasall a domestic affair after all.


The reporter had asked the police commissioner if allegations of a covert mili-tary coup was at hand with attached soldiers with the armed men were true, butthe police comissioner declined to reply, citing that they were still investigatingthe situation, and any premature conclusions thus released can and will jeopardiseall those who are in close contact with the insurgency. I remembered looking atthe police commissioner dead in the eye over the large television screen, and whatI saw was unmistakeable. He was lying through his teeth. Usually they were morecomfortable with sending out their press representative to talk to the media on allsorts of things, including operations such as this, but things were serious enoughthat the commissioner himself had to show up in front of the camera to downplaythe severity of the whole chain of events. Besides, he was also blinking a wholelot, something that was often an indicator of less than complete truthfulness. Youmight think of it as being presumptuous to claim that I could see all these throughthe television, but you must understand that at that point, I had already spoken toway more people than I would care to count, more than half of which were throughinterviews as part of human resources to evaluate their suitability for work at thecompanies that I was a human resources officer of. So the ability to actually tellwhen someone was being truthful versus when he wasn’t was something that Imanaged to hone to an art.

That actually got me thinking, the whole situation being worse than reportedthing. The storming of the parliament house by amateurish armed men withunidentifiable weapons in a city-state where all the male populace had to undergocompulsory conscription was not the key thing that the police commissioner wasworried about, and for a good reason—those men had little to no chance of actuallydoing any real damage, since unidentifiable weapons in a weapons control city-state meant that they were likely to be home-made. Smuggling was not possibleconsidering the extremely tight book-keeping and auditing that is done at alllevels. But then again, even if they had smuggled in good weapons, so what if theymanaged to secure the parliament house when it has all the members of parliamentin there, it’s not like they can do anything permanent about the laws; they canforce them to rewrite whatever the hell they want, all it takes is the president oreven a super majority of parliamentarians at a future sitting to disavow the stuffthat was written under duress to undo whatever nonsensical naıve rubbish thoseanarcho-restorists wanted. In short, the storming of parliament house was a redherring.

Even the massive meet ups of the armed protesters or anarcho-restorists arenot that worrisome for the police commissioner, and I was inclined to think so aswell. More red herrings. Sure, they were big, they had a lot of people, they made

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a lot of noise, they blocked the hell out of the roads from everyone, they drewa lot of attention to the whole anarcho-restorist rhetoric, but they were still justdistractions to the real problem that the police commissioner was dismissing—there was a real chance that there was a coup d’Etat was taking place behind thescenes by the military.

It made a lot of sense to me then. The set up seemed perfect. Rouse the dumbanarcho-restorists up into a violent armed uprising, station a few plainsclothestroops among them to provide fire assistance, and then attempt to “help” thepolice when things go out of hand before stealing parliament and getting thepresident to declare martial law, thus having the military be in complete controlover the civil authority.

But I didn’t care then, I still don’t care now. I just saw the whole affair asbeing completely useless and misguided. Those so-called anarcho-restorists wouldprobably stand a better chance at change had they actually put all their effortin planning for these elaborate demonstration schemes into forming their politicalparty and challenging the incumbents at a general election. At least that way,they gain the kind of respectability and legitimacy that made any form of lawchange legal and permanent, assuming that their ideas on “restoring the intentof the constitution” were not misguided to begin with. But I had more pressingthings to do.

I called home to look for your Uncle Ted, and was unsurprised to find thathe wasn’t at home, or that he hadn’t been home for the past few days as well. Ifigured that the knuckle head was probably among those who were intending toriot. Your uncle was effectively a fully grown man at that point, and I saw littleneed to attempt to change him whatsoever—if it was a choice he had made, hewould have to live through the choices and figure out how to deal with what wascoming to him.

Lucille: That was all your involvement in the Restoration Conflict? I mean,you were at the office when it all broke out?

Ruth: Are you trying to sass me, Lucille? Because if you are, I can still get upand thwack you even though I’m getting close to being ninety.

Lucille: No, no, no. . . I mean, what else happened? Did you have a more. . .direct involvement in the whole affair?

Ruth: Well. . .


Not at first, no. There was still work to be done, and if you had been like meworking since the ninety eighties where life was really tough, you’d learn to blockeverything out and keep on working—the world can burn, but the world wasn’tthe one paying me to foot my own bills, if you know what I mean. So it was mostlyalright. That is, until when they announced that the assault team on parliamenthouse had successfully taken over the place. A spokesperson had sent a messageto the nearest television crew to read out loud, and it said that the prime ministerwas hurt and that the rest of parliament would be sequestered until the offendinglaws that were against the spirit of the constitution were excised fully from thelegislation. I heard what was said, and felt it was the worst form of bullshit I’veever heard. But, as I said, it was just something that happened, and I knew itwouldn’t affect me. We’d right it soon enough.

Then a couple of days later, one of my staff told me to read the newspapers’headline. I was confused as to why such a request was made—usually no one saidanything about the newspaper. I shrugged and picked up the one from the pantryand flipped through it. It didn’t take me long to see why my staff was hinting tome that strongly to read the newspapers that day.

The headlines were sensational, no doubt, but they carried a grave messagefrom the spokesperson from the group that was holding the parliament house. Iread the main article to glean the key information from it. It turns out that shortlyafter the armed group had stormed the parliament house to take it hostage, quitea few soldiers were seen positioning themselves outside of the building proper anddeploying various heavy weaponry and vehicles, as though they were guarding thebuilding from any one from the outside. That sounded very fishy to me—insteadof actually sending anyone in to alleviate the situation, it was very clear the themilitary was making a stand of sorts on the whole “Restoration Conflict” nonsense.But something didn’t add up—all those heavy weaponry and vehicles, were theytrying to defend against other military factions, because I sure as hell couldn’t seehow the regular police force or even their paramilitary arm being that tough thatsuch heavy weaponry were needed in the first place.

But that aside, the part that was most curious was the message that was sentout. It said that parliament had repealed all sections of laws and agreementswith other countries that gave an unfair labour market access advantage to them,and that the law was to kick in to effect immediately, which meant that therewas an immediate hire freeze of foreigners from the affected countries, and amongthose that were already employed, if they were employed after the treaties andagreements were signed, they had to undergo a reassessment held by the manpowerministry to test for suitability, failing which the company that hired them would

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be fined for each case of unsuitable hiring of foreign workers. That was probablywhat riled up my staff to point it out to me. The IT firm that I was head ofhuman resources of was mostly full of foreign talents, and if this new “law” wereto be enacted thus and more importantly, enforced, it meant that we would losea good chunk of our workers, leading to an overall drop of productivity.

Having read the article, I went to look for my staff and asked her what wasthe general trend like out there. She told me “It doesn’t look good. Some of themhad started to take leave en masse, with some providing excuses of feeling unwellfrom the recently erupted riots and demonstrations, while others were just saying‘personal reasons’ without elaboration. I suspect that they might be heading outfor the demonstrations or something to vent their anger against the new laws.”

“But don’t they realise there is no way in hell that the law can be enforced,”I countered, feeling my blood pressure increasing. “It will take their bureaucracymonths to get the process sorted out and a few more weeks after that to actuallycome down and do the enforcement, by which this farcical law would have beenrepealed ten times over.”

“Well,” she replied slowly, “we all know that. But there’s really nothing wecan do to tell them to not do anything stupid. You know that there’s nothing thatwe can do to stop them, not legally anyway.”

“The hell with the law,” I said in disgust. Just then, the director peeked hishead into our office, and seeing me standing there, said “Ruth, could you cometo my office for a while? There are some things I want to discuss with you.” Inodded at my staff before heading to the director’s office.

His office was unlike ours—it was a single big room with a large mahoganydesk in the farthest edge of the room right in front of the windows. Nearer to theentrance was a small set of couches and associated coffee tables, clearly what wasused by him when entertaining potential clients or talking with staff in a moreinformal setting. But when I entered the room that day, he was already seatedbehind the large work desk, his face scowling as he read the newspapers that werespread out in front of him.

“Ruth, please close the door behind you when you’re in and take a seat. Weneed to talk.”

I walked quietly into the room and closed the door softly behind me beforewalking forward more and taking a seat in one of the two low-backed caster-wheeled chairs. I sat there and waited quietly. It was his turf, he was the one whocalled for the meeting, and while I sort of knew what ws it he was going to ask me,I didn’t want to be the one to breach the silence. Offices had a code of behavior,an etiquette if you will, something that I’m not sure you young folks know or even


practice, given all your hippy-like liberalist slant. He was the director, my boss,and so it was the right thing to wait for him to make the first remark. It wasimportant, that first remark, since it set the tone of the meeting that was to come.If he sounded completely combative, I had to be placating, and if he sounded indoubt, I had to project confidence. But I had no idea which of the lot was hisreaction going to be, and so, I merely waited.

“Ruth, have you read the newspapers this morning?” He said with a frown.

“Yes boss.”

“What do you think about it?” He looked at me intently.

“Worst case, best case analysis?”

“Yes, the usual. And don’t try to tone it down—this seems very serious andI want to know just how bad the situation is,” he said, again with the intensivelook.

“Okay boss. Here’s the thing. Most of our local hires have already taken leaveand I suspect are already out there protesting and demonstrating and potentiallyeven rioting. If this thing blows over before their leaves end, I don’t think there’sanything that we need to do, since as far as human resources is concerned, it’s stuffthey did during their off, and therefore have nothing to do with us. Now, someof our foreign hires have also taken leave recently en masse, and if they returnbefore their leaves run out, again there’s no problem on our side, no matter whatthey do. This is the best case scenario. Of course, this is barring any new legalobligations that we may be subjected to.

“If both groups do not return by the end of their leaves, we will face a moreserious problem than merely losing a few days of work—those who are still heremay be tempted to go AWOL on us and join in the whole rioting shindig. Basedon what I remember, we don’t have major deadlines within the next month or two,so we can probably put up with a small hit in productivity. However, if thingsstretch on, we will be unable to deliver for the MILSA project, which is hefty sincewe already had to get an extension from them. That’s the only big thing that canknock us over. And that’s the worst case scenario.”

“MILSA. . . that’s the military project, right?”

“Yes,” I replied and sat there quietly once more, waiting for his reaction. It wasclear that he was thinking hard about the problem—his brow was furrowed, hiseyes squeezed shut, his head leaning forward and down. I didn’t want to disturbhim; it wasn’t in my place to do so anyway. So I just waited for his decision.

“Ah fuck it,” he said with an air of finality that shocked me. “I’ll go talk tothe MILSA people and see if we can get another extension. I think your worstcase is the most likely thing to happen. We might as well plan around it instead

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of waiting for it to happen.”

“Most likely?” I asked quizzically.

“Yes. Think about it. Fifty odd years in the city-state; no protests, no riots,not even a single placard-waving event against any thing. Then suddenly, thisnon-random looking random collection of people everywhere. Then the weir ashell law that was just announced. It’s going to be a bloody party out there, andsooner or later, they are all going to join them. Might as well prepare for thateventuality and hope that we pull through it without too much of a hit. There’sno way we’re going to meet the MILSA deadline given this nonsense anyway. . . ”

I just sat there and absorbed what he had just said. I agreed with his assess-ment about things, but you know, he was the boss, and I was still his underlingdespite being the head of human resources and all. So I waited a bit more to seeif there was anything that he wanted to tell me. He looked up from the newspa-pers for the last time and gave me a nod to show that the impromptu morningconference was over, and I headed back to my desk.

At that point, my leave clerk was in an obvious panic. The moment I steppedinto the human resources office, she was already running towards me in a blindpanic of anxieties and other unmentionables. I looked at her dead in the eye andasked her as calmly as I could, “What’s the matter?”

“The rest of the staff. . . they have all applied for leave for the next couple ofweeks. And the leaves were approved by their project heads and what not. Theonly people who hadn’t done any leave application are those that report directlyto you or to the boss.”

“Interesting,” I replied without skipping a beat. The worst case scenario wasindeed playing itself out at this point, and there was almost nothing that we cando about it. “Don’t panic—it’ll be fine. The big project deadline will be re-negotiated and hopefully things will blow over enough that we can still meet whatis required.” She nodded her head fearfully and went back to her desk.

I sat down at my own desk and rubbed my temples. It was one thing to teardown something in an abstract sense to make analysis upon it, it’s a completelydifferent thing to actually experience it in the form that it was, in its full physicalityand unmistaken goriness.

Lucille: Was this when the “neo-conservatists” term came about?

Ruth: What? The “neo-conservatist” term? Well, in a way. The media neededsome catchy sounding thing to describe the two sides of their little conflict anddecided that since it was about the restoration of the constitution, the whole affair


might as well be called the “Restoration Conflict”. And since the instigators wererunning around without obeying the law and demanding the restoration of theconstitution, they ought to be labelled as “anarcho-restorists”. And those of uswho are not neutral and not on the side of the restoration, those of us who preferthe status quo and the reduction of such senseless and poorly planned uprisings,they called us the “neo-conservatists”, since we were later to the party, justifyingthe “neo” part, and want to preserve the status quo despite the nonsense thatthe anarcho-restorists were trying to do, which justified the “conservative parts”.If you ask me, all these terms are bogus, more red herrings away from what wasreally going on.

Lucille: Will you tell me, grandma?

Ruth: In a bit. But first, let me talk a little more about the riots and demon-strations during the initial two months of the Restoration Conflict.

The next time that I went to the office, I found it uncomfortably quiet. Therewas almost no one around. The locals were well into their second week of leavewith no clear signs that they would be back before they fully exhausted theirleave days, while the non-locals were starting on theirs. The lights were still onby virtue of the centralised lighting mechanism that the building runs on—therewere override switches that would keep the lights on for an additional hour eachtime they were hit after the lights out timing was arrived at, but the whole placewas eerily quiet. There were no sounds of anyone going through the hum drum ofactually starting to work, no sounds of coffee mugs being placed on tables froma sip, no sounds of keyboards clacking from the non-stop typing that some of thepeople liked to do. The air-conditioner was the only thing that was making aconsistenly low hum and that was it.

Eerie.

I went to my desk in the human resources office and sat down. Inside weremy staff, all ten of them. They hadn’t gone on leave. I didn’t know why thatwas the case. Perhaps they didn’t feel as strongly for the whole buzz behind theRestoration Conflict. Or maybe they reported to me and seeing how I was talkingwith the boss on the whole thing, were suspecting that I was most unlikely ingranting approval for their leave to do anything related to the goings on that washappening at the meeting points as well as the parliament house itself. The tensionthat was present was stifling. It was hard to ignore—even a neophyte could sensethat there was an unspoken tension that existed in the room. I sat there andignored it for a good two hours, trying to work through some of the new contracts

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that we were supposed to get signed with some of the new hires, but I couldn’treally concentrate when at the back of my mind all I could think about was thatperhaps that candidate wouldn’t even bother signing up with us in the first placegiven the whole circus affair that was happening now at the so-called RestorationConflict. It was at that moment that I had a single point of clarity, the realisationthat even though I personally didn’t feel that the whole nonsense was actually awise move, it would hurt me in the long run if I didn’t even bother taking actionto stop it from deteriorating more. I knew that the stupid laws that they weretrying to rewrite would never hold in the long run, but I was too annoyed to notrealise that in the short term, they could still do a lot of harm to the companyas a whole and myself as an individual. For once since the bad old days wherework was hard to come by and everyone had to work as hard as they could, Ifelt fear once again, the fear that the whole anarcho-restoration movement couldcause the collapse of companies and employers during the time period in whichthe nonsensical work was disavowed.

I slammed my file into the table and startled all ten staff in the room withme. They looked hard at me, the way deer stare motionless into the headlightsof the on coming car. They waited for me to say something; none of them daredto move or utter a word in case he or she became the point of all my perceivedanger. I breathed deep a couple of times to even out my breath and calm myselfdown. Then, I stood up and gazed upon all of them, looking each of them in theeye as best as I could.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know about all of you, but I can feel thatthere’s a certain tension within the air in the office today. I know that there issomething big going on out there, and that perhaps some of you feel that youshould do something about it based on whatever you own feelings on the matterare. I know that all of you have seen and heard the reports of the mass exodusof workers on leave from our company, and I know that all of you have the samekinds of suspicions as I with regards to what they are doing with their taken leave.Let me say some things to allay some of your unfounded fears.

“If you wish to do something, you may take leave. I will not disapprove ofit—what you do during your leave time is your own business and on the whole,we don’t really care about it. Just so long as you return for work after yourleave period, you will still have a job, no matter what happens with the currentmovement that is happening right now. However, if you choose to not return afteryour leave period expires, then we will have to consider your position with regardsto the obvious AWOL, and apply the policies that are stipulated in the contractsof employment. That is our company’s stand, and that is also my stand.


“However, that being said, I would like to give some advice, purely as myselfand not as your superior. Do what you want, but don’t do anything that will getyou into trouble with the wrong end of the law. If you get arrested or anythingduring this time period, it is not clear when you will be exonerated or convictedconsidering the flux that things are right now. The company cannot and will notswoop in to attempt to save you should that happen, so please, exercise judgementin whatever you do.

“With that, you may apply for immediate leave now if you want. I will notdisapprove it in the system.”

I said my piece and stayed standing for a while more to gauge the responsefrom my staff. Nothing. They were either too stunned or too scared to make amove. But from the looks on their faces, I could tell that they finally understoodsomething from me, that they were completely free to exercise what rights in freeassociation and what-not, and that if they played by the rules, they weren’t goingto lose their jobs over it. I sat back down and went back to working, trying mybest to ignore them so as to allow a little breathing room. Getting talked to insuch a manner by one’s boss isn’t exactly a walk in the park—there are very fewoccasions where the boss will do such a speech thing, and therefore each word thatis said such a way is taken with a lot weight.

I kept my focus on the contracts for an hour or so before I checked the inboxof my email. And sure enough, there were ten notifications, one for each of thestaff that I had on my human resources team. I took a quick peek from behind thecomputer terminal, and saw that they were all still at their desks, working away,as though they didn’t see nor say anything. I went into the leave approval systemand approved each of them, and was pleasantly surprised to find that their leavesall began the next day instead of immediately or even in the afternoon. That wasthe kind of behaviour from the kind of people that I had hired for my team, thekind that were willing to work hard and get work done before they went off to dosomething that involved their passion. I finished up the contracts and headed tothe boss’s office.

He was sitting there behind his desk and was on the phone talking with ourliaison of the MILSA project. The overall tone of voice was friendly but firm,and it seemed that even the people on the other side of the MILSA project werefully aware of the implications that the current affairs were causing us. There wasquite a bit of apologising on our side by the boss, but from the looks of his facialexpression, it seems that the people on the other side of the MILSA project wereagreeing with him and telling him something to the effect of not having to worryand that things were still going to move along albeit being a bit delayed and that

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our contract was still going to be valid with them and at the end of the day aslong as we delivered within a month or two of the deadline, we were still okay. Theboss thanked the listener on the other side for his understanding before hangingup the phone, his face looking grim.

“Ruth! What is it?”

“My team has taken leave as well.”

“Oh. Why’d you come to me though?”

“Because I’m thinking of taking leave myself.” He looked at me in shock, asthough I just said the most ridiculous and most unimaginable thing ever.

“You wanna get involved in that whole mess? Ruth! Of all people, I thoughtyou were the most level headed and most reasonable. Why’d you fall to the levelof the rabblement?”

“Well, I’m going to get involved in a sense, not as a demonstrator as you seeon television, but to actually look for my son and extricate him from the wholemess. Also, I think it’d be good if we were to spend time looking through justwhat is going on to make sure that when we get back up to speed, we won’t runafoul of the law, whatever shape it may be. I won’t be of much use here in theoffice any way without my staff, and so it all works out well I think. What aboutyou?”

The boss sighed as he looked at me, his air of despair obvious with defeatwritten all over his face. “I’ll sit around and handle queries from our clients.Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Ruth. If things get bad, I’ll need my humanresources head to come in and help find me replacements so we can ship out thestuff that we promised in the contracts.”

“No problem boss. Be safe and take care.”

“Be safe yourself, Ruth. You’re the one heading out there into the maelstrom.Don’t get caught in the cross fire. The latest descriptions of the situation haven’tbeen good. There had already been at least one street fight between the anarcho-restorists and the riot police, and there were quite a few who were hurt. As it was,it turns out that the anarcho-restorists had access to actual infantry weapons afterall, things like grenades and anti-armour weapons. Really scary stuff. Things youcan’t just. . . get. Someone is bank rolling them, and that some one is really reallybig. So be careful.”

I thought about what he said, and my deepest fears were starting to realise.That was when I really feared for your Uncle Ted’s life. I nodded my head at theboss and went back to my desk to file for the leave officially and to complete asmuch work as I could on the day so that I could take the two weeks off to go getyour Uncle Ted out of the stupid mess that he got himself into.


By the time I was done with work and heading home, it was already late inthe evening. The subway was still working; despite all the problems associatedwith the gatherings from the anarcho-restorists, many basic amenities were stilloperational in one way or another. In fact, sometimes things were working evenbetter than before, when the large load of passengers is severely lowered fromeveryone not actually having to travel anywhere. As I rode the subway back tomy apartment—the same one you are sitting in now, by the way—I couldn’t helpbut realise that there was something different from what I had been experiencing.For a moment, it felt like the nineteen eighties once again, where the pace of lifewas less hectic and aggravating yet all of us were still working as hard as we could,but we all knew that at the end of the day we could take a little rest to recoverand come back for more the next day. The subway being actually comfortable asopposed to the usual jam-packed sardining that was the norm—it was a refreshingfeeling to have. But it obviously wasn’t going to last; we needed as many people aswe could to work to ensure that the economic engine never fails. The city-state issmall, but it punches well above its weight in global business, and it was somethingthat we were particularly proud of. And because of that, there was always theneed to maintain our capabilities, through whatever means was necessary, for thebenefit of our future.

When I got home, I saw that your mum was sitting there on the couch, watchingthe television. I asked her where your Uncle Ted was, and she told me she had noidea where he could be, before adding that he hadn’t come home yet. I gloweredat her, but realised that there was nothing malicious about what she said—shewas merely answering my question with the most straightforward of answers, nodeceit, and most definitely no clue about your Uncle Ted’s whereabouts. I putdown my stuff at the dining table and took a quick shower before heading tohis bedroom. The door was locked, as usual, but seeing to the urgency of thematter, I took out the spare key and unlocked it in a manner of seconds. Atthat point, your mum was asking something to the effect of why was I going toyour Uncle Ted’s room, and I replied that it was needed to save his stupid neckfrom being lost in the cross fire of some serious heavy weight politics. She lookedat me quizzically in that dispassionate way that you know your mother tends tohave, before finally shrugging and going back to the television. At that point,there was round the clock coverage of the situation, yet despite all the attentionheaped on to the matter, actual new information had been scant. What was saidby the talking heads during that time, I had already heard of earlier in the day.Realising the uselessness of the television broadcast, I tuned it out of my head.Or it could be that your mum switched off the television—it isn’t really clear now

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what happened. But I remembered entering your Uncle Ted’s room.

I flicked on the light switch, and the fluorescent light above blinked twice beforemaintaining its luminosity. I looked about me. It was a typical guy’s room then,if you can even picture something like that. It wasn’t that your Uncle Ted was amessy person, it was just that he had so much stuff just lying around, albeit inneat piles. There was a small path that allowed one to walk carefully among thepiles to the bed and desk, but other than that, the floor was covered completelywith odds and ends. The last time that I remembered ever entering his room waswhen he was still in primary school, when we had the open door policy where noneof the bedroom doors were allowed to be closed at all times, since it allowed usto keep an eye out on what they are doing; mostly as a way of ensuring that theywere doing their homework. But from secondary school onwards, we never reallyentered their rooms. But I digress.

I looked about his room, trying to find clues as to where he had gone. I knewthat he had gone for one of the gathering points since it was an open secret thathe really didn’t like the status quo. He was always complaining about work, abouthow his boss was being sadistic, and how his co-workers were always trying to takecredit away from him while continuously dumping their work in his lap. Frankly,I think he was just being an anti-team player. I mean, it was to be expectedthat co-workers cover for each other when working in a team, since it plays onthe strengths of each individual to increase the overall effectiveness of the team. Isuspect that things weren’t really as bad as he claimed, and the he was just belly-aching, cherry-picking the parts that were terrible and just kept on harping onthem, while conveniently forgetting the parts where his co-workers were coveringup for him. In short, I think your Uncle Ted was very immature despite his age.Such a thing as “joining the anarcho-restorists” would probably be an easy enoughdecision for him to make, especially with all the loud noise and big actions theyseem to be taking to restore things to back what they were.

The sad thing was that he and the rest of those anarcho-restorists had no ideawhat “back what they were” meant. Too damn spoilt, if you ask me.

Anyway, I was looking about. I saw some steel piping and wooden blocksaround, and started to suspect that his involvement in the anarcho-restorist wasmore than just a demonstrator. You must understand that we didn’t have amachine shop in the house, and your Uncle Ted was never known to be one ofthose tinkering types, that is, he was never doing any sort of craft work, as far as Icould remember. But not too long ago, he was making all these trips to the nearbyhackerspace, often carrying odds and ends there and back. More importantly, heseemed to be doing it on the sly, becoming extremely evasive each time I asked


him whenever I chanced an encounter.

Lucille: Grandma, what’s a “hackerspace”?

Ruth: Oh right. You guys don’t have that any more, or rather, it’s just aregular ol’ machine shop these days. Okay. Back in the early two thousands, therewas a movement of tinkering and crafts. Some call it the “maker faire” effect orwhatever. Well, one of the by products of the “maker faire” effect was the creationof physical spaces where 3D printers and some simple machines that you’d expectto find in a machine shop like a small-scale CNC, lathes, drills, scroll saws and thelike were all present in the same area, complete with tables and chairs or benchesand lots of power sockets. Those physical spaces were known as “hacker spaces”,after the traditional meaning of “hacker”, as in someone who is willing to putusual objects through unusual uses. It’s sort of like an inventor’s paradise, wherethe main limitations were that of skill and imagination.

Lucille: Oh! So it’s an earlier version of the community machine shop conceptthat we have now?

Ruth: Yes. If anything, I’d say they just renamed the whole thing because theword “hacker” was getting a rather bad reputation from abuse by everyone.

Lucille: I see I see. . .

Ruth: Anyway. . .

The outcome of his work at the hackerspace was clear. The steel pipes wereobviously cut through, and the wooden blocks were also shaped in rather suggestiveways. And then, partially obfuscated in the corner, an early prototype revealeditself. It was a long-barrelled gun. It looked very crude, and more importantly,there were signs that it had been fired with some form of ammo. I could tellbecause there were tell-tale burn marks from the flame or whatever it was thatcame out of guns when the trigger were pulled, that and there was some crackin the piping. Maybe that’s why it was discarded in the corner like that. Wherehe got the ammo to load the gun with for firing, I didn’t know—I didn’t smellanything that was out of the ordinary in the room.

So my worst fears were realised from that discovery. Not only was he a demon-strator with the so-called anarcho-restorists, he was also one of those that wastermed as a “fighter”, one of the many people who actually brought down homemade firearms. That knowledge filled me with anger, lots of it. If he had onlybeen a supporter or regular demonstrator, I probably would have let it slide, and

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think of it as a way for him to express his dislike of the current situation. Now Ithink that his perspective was wrong, but he was a fully grown man at that point,and he was fully entitled to his own views and choices, but he will have to learn tolive with the consequences. But as a fighter, there was almost no way he was goingto walk away from it all. As a fighter, he was at the front line for everything thatthe anarcho-restorists stood for, no matter who twisted it was. He was armed,and was therefore going to be among the first targets in any confrontation withthe police or at worst, the military. While he had done his national conscriptionlike the rest of his cohort, he hadn’t been called up for training for a long time,which meant that his skills were probably rusty as well. So, stacking all thesetogether meant that his role in the anarcho-restorists was going to be completeand absolute suicide.

I couldn’t let it happen. Lucille, you don’t understand it now, probably, sinceyou’re not married with children. But there’s one thing you must understand,no matter how wrong one’s child can get, at the end of the day, it’s still one’schild. I believed that your Uncle Ted was going down the wrong path—I stilldo—and would gladly let him learn his own lessons the hard way. But when thehard way that was presented was death, it threw everything out of the window. Ijust wanted him back safe and sound, no matter what his thoughts on the wholepolitical mess were. That was no longer important. Yes, I am what you call aneo-conservatist—I think that the system back then was good enough for us, ithad a few glitches here and there, but I was confident that it will be fixed in time,if time were to be given to it. But your Uncle Ted was a fighter for the anarcho-restorists, a group of people who probably have no idea just what they were doing,or what they were really up against, and he was going to be sacrificed just like thecountless men and women in each of these silly armed protests or “revolution”.

So I knew he was a fighter. Then I started to dig around more to find outwhich of the meeting places he had gone so that I could go there and drag himback, by hook or by crook. I had spent quite a bit of time in your Uncle Ted’sroom, and at this point your mum got curious and got up from vegetating at thecouch and stood at your Uncle Ted’s bedroom door, looking at me and asking if Ihad found what I was looking for. I shushed her and said that I still didn’t knowwhere he was located among the crowd, and told her that I hoped he wasn’t a partof the parliment house assault team, since that group didn’t have much good newscoming from it. She looked at me the way that only she could and shrugged hershoulders. Before she turned away though, she said she remembered him clutchingsome paper that seemed to be ripped out of a notebook the last time that she sawhim as he was heading out of the apartment to God knows where. With that


in mind, I started looking around for notebooks. I suspected that the notebookwas used to write down the location or something, and with a little luck, I couldprobably get the original information that was written down without having theoriginal.

No, there’s no complicated trick involved. Your Uncle Ted likes to use ballpointpens, and he tends to write with a heavy hand. This meant that if he was scribblingsomething down on a stack of paper like in a notebook, it was highly likely thatthe pages behind the one that he was writing on would have an emboss of thethings that he wrote. I’m surprised you don’t know about this. Oh wait, you guysdon’t actually write on paper all that much any more. Sorry, your grandma istoo old. Some of these new-fangled things that you have are just beyond me. Tome, a good pen and paper will beat any of these weird touch-board screen thingsyou guys use these days—never needs electricity, and can be easily read under asimple light source, and you can always add new stuff and annotations withouthaving to be near a touch-board surface.

Anyway, I found the notebook eventually, and grabbed a pencil nearby andgently shaded the relief. The writing showed up and I then knew that he had goneto the shopping district meeting point. I heaved a sigh of relief—even though itwas one of the larger meeting points for the anarcho-restorists, it was also oneof the more quiet ones, since there were few confrontations ever since the riotpolice were beat back by infantry weapons. I wanted to just rush down rightthen and drag your Uncle Ted home by the ear, but I didn’t do so. Firstly, itwas already quite late, and visibility wasn’t good. When you are talking abouta bunch of armed people, the last thing you want to do is to surprise them byjust. . . appearing like that. They get all twitchy and are likely to shoot first andask questions later. Secondly, even if I managed to get there, it would be hard toeven get close to the place, given all the cordons by the police. And finally, evenif I managed to reach the mob through the cordon, there was the hard question ofactually locating your Uncle Ted among the many anonymous faces. Not worththe risk if you can see what I mean. I still wanted to live myself, it’s not a fairtrade to trade my life for his under any circumstance, and especially when it wasbecause he made a stupid choice to begin with.

It was the next day that I got up relatively early and started to prepare forthe trip to the shopping district to get your Uncle Ted back. Your mother wokeup early and was already watching the television, or maybe she never left thetelevision since the night before—it’s hard to tell with your mother. She’s weird.She was roughly your age then, so you probably can understand what I mean. Anyhow, she greeted me and told me that nothing new was going on and when I said

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I was heading out to pick up your Uncle Ted, she merely shrugged and told megood day, without even offering to come along for support of any sort. ActuallyI can understand why—it really wan’t her business. And so I headed out to theshopping district.

On the way there though, I started to get a better sensing of the whole situa-tion. You know, Lucille, it’s one thing to watch the happenings on television, andit’s another thing to actually be there, well sort of. I started from the subway,and as it went along the tracks and getting closer to the shopping district, ateach stop, it was starting to be clear that there were more people getting on thangetting off. Moreover, those that were getting on the subway had the distinctive“foreignness” about them; they seemed to be coming from different countries, beit India, China, the Phillippines, Indonesia or whatever. There were also a fewthat I thought were locals, but it was hard to say, since no one was actually sayinganything. One thing was clear though, everyone was trying their hardest to avoideye contact with one another, me included. There was this tense awkwardness inthe air that was even more stifling than the daily sardinification of commuters. Icould almost swear that the tense awkwardness was so thick that should someonejust yell something, anything, it would just snap and cause a general ruckus thatwould be deadly considering the highly confined area. But thankfully that didn’thappen. And when we got to the stop that was closest to the shopping districtmeeting point, almost everyone on the train got out at the same time, cloggingup the escalators and even the stairs to the surface exit. I was at once amazedand fearful at what I was already starting to observe—there were a real shit tonof people out there for this. None of them seemed armed, at least, not armed inthe way that I thought they would be given what I saw on television and what Ifound in your Uncle Ted’s room. Nevertheless, I tried my best to avoid them asbest as I could as I made my way out of the subway.

The immediate surroundings reminded me of that show, “Shanghai Bund” orsomething, where the triads were preparing for a face-off against each other. Ithad the same feel to it. At the immediate exit of the subway were some policeofficers, trying to keep whatever was left of the peace while simultaenousely tryingtheir hardest to not get embroiled into direct confrontation with the two massedmobs. They were trying their best, of course, but no one seemed to give a damnabout them—everyone was walking wherever the hell they pleased, some headingtowards the right, and the other to the left. I just stood near the exit while doingmy best to keep out of people’s way, trying to identify where the anarcho-restoristswere located. I’m not a tall person now, but you can probably attribute that to oldage. But back then, I wasn’t that tall either, so it was hard trying to differentiate


one mob of people from another given all the people in between. But after a while,I could sort of differentiate which side was the anarcho-restorists, and which sidewere the neo-conservatists. I gently pushed my way out of the crowd that wasfiltering and made my way slowly towards the anarcho-restorist camp, followingthe line of supporters that were heading in the same direction. With each stepforward towards the camp, I could feel my pulse increasing—it was exhiliratingof sorts, but it was also very very scary. Let me put it into perspective. We’retalking about walking towards a group of armed men, who are also known to haveweapons that were strong enough to deter the riot police from even approachingthem, and they were twitchy, and were generally trying to keep a watch out at theneo-conservatist side to ensure those people didn’t overrun them. And we werewalking from the same general direction where the neo-conservtists were located.So it was as harrowing as one can possibly think.

A few tense minutes later, I found myself among the anarcho-restorists. Ex-pecting it to be an unruly group of sub forty-year-olds who had their onset of amid-life crisis, I was surprised to find that it was quite heterogenous in make up.There were the group that I talked of, then there were those who were fifty orso, well established people in their fields, or so it seems, who were lending theirsupport to the anarcho-restorist cause. I revolted at the back of my mind, wonder-ing to myself how could those people turn coat and look down against what hadoriginally brought them to where they were in the first place. But I had to checkmyself quickly—I was literally in the enemy’s camp, and considering the levels oftension, a false move was literally the one thing I didn’t want to make while there.

I started asking around for your Uncle Ted, but everywhere I turned to, Iwas met with an apologetic smile—no one knew anyone by the name of “Ted”.Of course, now I know that for “safety” reasons, none of the anarcho-restoristsused their real names in calling each other—they each had their own self-chosennicknames to cover up their traces a little more. Without knowing the chosennickname of your Uncle Ted, I was basically searching for a needle in a haystack.I spent a couple of hours looking for him among that crowd, and either I was veryunlucky or he was actively evading me each time I got close enough, because Iended the day without actually finding him. A pity though, if I had gotten himthat day, perhaps things wouldn’t escalate the way it did for him.

Lucille: Escalate?

Ruth: Yes, escalate. Didn’t you interview your Uncle Ted first or something?

Lucille: Yes. . . but I didn’t mention that to you.

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Ruth: Ha. It’s your quizzical look and that question that made me realise thatyou had probably talked to your Uncle Ted. If you hadn’t heard his version ofmatters, how could you even think that there was something wrong when I usedthe word “escalate”. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you what happened, but thenagain, your Uncle Ted was always a prideful person, never wanting to show thatat some level he was actually losing out or anything. In fact, it was possible thathe constructed some kind of elaborate story to show off some kind of heroism orsomething. Am I right?

Lucille: Well. . .

Ruth: It’s okay. You don’t need to tell me anything. There’s a reason whyyour Uncle Ted and I are not talking to each other any more. We’ll leave it asthat and just move on. I’m telling my version of the story—you don’t have to tellme his version; I don’t really want to know anything about it. You can decidelater on the differences and the truth between the two versions and draw your ownconclusions.

Lucille: Okay grandma. . .

Ruth: As I was saying. . .

By the time I got home that evening, I was a wreck. I couldn’t find yourUncle Ted, and more importantly, I started to discover that the people who wereall supporting the anarcho-restorists weren’t just the group of people that I wasexpecting—they included people whom I thought would actually know better thanto support this hare-brained crowd, especially since they have lived through theearlier era where the times were bad and they had all the support that the gov-ernment could provide without completely taking over their lives. It pained me.I was so confused and so angry. But all these were nothing when I watched thenews broadcast for that evening.

Your mother was sitting there when I reached home. She was writing away inher notebook as the television blared on in the background. I yelled at her to stopwasting electricity and to shut the television down if she wasn’t even watchingit in the first place, but she merely replied calmly that she was listening to thenews as she was working on some school assignment. Curious, I didn’t pursuethe matter any more, but instead stood there and watched the news broadcastas well. I couldn’t remember what day it was exactly, but I remembered clearlywhat I saw. Shortly after I had left the place, the riot police had returned toencircling all the protestors in the shopping district, this time reinforced withmore paramilitary personnel that looked vaguely like they were from the military.


It was hard to tell from the poor footage—something that I thought was probablya deliberate attempt to camouflage the real people who where there—but it wasclear that whatever those people were, they had a very strong sense of disciplineand hardness behind them that was unmistakeable even through their silhouettes.

The new encirclement of the protestors had two effects. One, it severely limitedthe flow of people in and out of the area, which starved both the neo-conservatistsand the anarcho-restorists of their precious support from the outside world, aswell as to reduce the likelihood that any of them were able to escape should thewarrant for arrest was given. Two, it also forced the two groups of protestorsto come closer together, which in turn created the perfect situation in which achaotic affair was created, allowing the encircling forces to swoop in and performthe clean-up and arrests to end the whole affair. Those were the filled in drivelthat the newscaster was talking live on air, but I suspected that someone hadgiven her a prepared script to read off of. But the ramifications were clear to me;the authorities have decided to hit back not with direct force, but with indirectforce by first coercing the mobs to implode under their own pressure, causingthe needed infighting to thin out and weaken the numbers while simultaneouslyavoiding direct responsibility of what happened. It was a brilliant idea, somethingthat only a bureaucrat could think of, that was the thought that came to meimmediately when I saw it.

But they got more than they bargained for.

The encirclement did in fact cause the two opposing mobs to close up, orrather, it forced the neo-conservatists to move closer to the anarcho-restorists.You must remember that the latter group was already quite encamped there atthat point, complete with tents and control centres and all the usual things onewould expect from a field camp, whereas the neo-conservatists were still trying toestablish themselves, being of a more loosly connected group that hadn’t actuallydug deep and fortify themselves. It was then that some of the more aggressive neo-conservatists decided to lob projectiles of various sorts at the anarcho-restorists,including improvised incendiary weapons. That was the literal spark to the severebacklash where the armed anarcho-restorists started to fire back at the advancingneo-conservatists with their guns.

The news reported that the situation was quite grim for both sides. Someof the anarcho-restorists sustained severe burns from the molotov cocktails thatwere launched at them, particularly those who were armed and nearer the frontlines that met with the neo-conservatists. Many more of the neo-conservatistssustained various gun wounds from the bullets that were fired by the anarcho-restorists at them through all manners of small arms fire, be they home made or,

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as some eye-witnesses had confirmed, military-grade small arms like their assaultrifles. The paramedics had a hard time entering to evacuate the injured due tothe heavy barricade set up by the riot police, and aerial reports from the newsmedia had confirmed that the wounded situation was not good at the confrontationspot. There was, strangely enough, no indication of any form of backlash or angeragainst the authorities for taking this particular course of inaction, perhaps mostpeople were starting to get annoyed at the rhetoric and symbolic mumbo-jumboto give a damn about them.

As the news reporter continued, one could hear the loud roar of people clashingin the background amid the sounds of gun retorts. It was clear that the confronta-tion between the neo-conservatists and the anarcho-restorists were still raging on.The riot police had shrunk their encirclement further, and the effects were gettingmore pronounced. Some of the paramedics managed to contact with people whohad been dragging out the wounded to the best of their abilities, and were loadingthem into military and police ambulances in the background. It was clear thatthose who were so evacuated were going to face the full wrath of the law whenthey are sufficient recovered—none of those ambulances were ever activated in thecivilian world unless something big was going on.

And for a fleeting second before the scene switched over to yet another aerialshot of the shopping district under siege, I spotted your Uncle Ted lying on astretcher and being loaded into an ambulance.

I gave a scream at that point, which shocked the hell out of your mother, whopromptly dropped her pen and cussed, before turning to me and asking me, in herwords, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”.

I told her I saw your Uncle Ted being loaded into an ambulance. She lookedat me in a very confused way before asking me if I was sure, considering that theentire scene lasted no more than five seconds and it was also in the background,with poor lighting and camera angle. I looked at her as though she were crazy andtold her that it was nearly impossible for me to not recognise how your Uncle Tedlooks like and that she should stop being that ignorant disaffected person that shewas and help me find out where they had taken your Uncle Ted, telling her that Isaw them loading him in one of those military or police ambulance, which meantthat nothing good could come out of it.

Your mother looked at me in my hysterical state and told me to calm downand told me that sooner or later they would be giving us a call when things wereless hectic. She also told me that it was probably useless to try and find outwhere he was now, considering that he was on the ambulance—technically thingswere still in a transition state, and making any phone calls to determine where


he was sent to was just going to be a waste of everyone’s time. Somehow yourmother managed to keep me from going all crazy about things, and eventually Icalmed down and sat next to her on the couch to watch the rest of the coveragefor that event. As it turned out, the riot police encirclement kept on shrinkingand causing more and more altercations between the two mobs to the point thatmore than half of them were hurt in one way or another. It was another half anhour or so before the riot police armed themselves with their batons and shieldsand charged into the fray, backed up by their own snipers and other mysterioussharpshooters. They managed to get through and subdue the neo-conservatists’side of the conflict, but as for the anarcho-restorists’ side, it took them a wholenight later before they too were taken down.

Of course the news coverage didn’t span all throughout the night, or rather,we didn’t stay up that late to watch everything transpiring. I read about the finaldefeat of the anarcho-restorists at the shopping district in the newspapers the nextmorning. It was a bloody confrontation. The anarcho-restorists were better armedand had lots of good fighters on their side, which meant that the riot police hada hard time trying to overcome their defenses to get to them for an arrest. Acouple of snipers on the riot police’s side were badly hurt when counter-sniped byhidden snipers from within the anarcho-restorists camp. Lots of rounds were fired,and many tear gas grenades were used on the riot police’s side. Surprisingly, theanarcho-restorists didn’t use their infantry-grade grenades much, and there wasmuch speculation as to why, with some of the theories suggesting that they hadrun out of the grenades, to those that suggested that the anarcho-restorists knewthat they were going to lose and therefore saw no need to aggravate any form ofcharges that they would be levied with on their eventual and inevitable arrest.

To me, it wasn’t that important. It was all an academic problem. The impor-tant thing was, where was your Uncle Ted? For that, we didn’t have an answer tillnearly a week later. But in the intervening week, there had been more news fromthe parliament house side of things. It was reported then that the sequesteredmembers of parliament had managed to undo quite a few pieces of laws that theanarcho-restorists claimed were infringing upon the spirit of the constitution andthat soon they were going to be released as previously promised. As for the var-ious gatherings around outside of the shopping district, they were also strangledto death one by one by the riot police with the help of other unidentified paramil-itary troops, using roughly the same tactics as was done at the shopping district,which was the biggest of the mob gatherings. As for the parliament house, thesoldiers that were outside of it were still keeping guard during the entire period,but their commanding officer had not been found yet, due to the lack of identifica-

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tion markings on both soldiers and vehicles. The generals from the armed forcescouncil made a public statement condemning the unidentified army officer whodeployed his troops there without actually rescuing the members of parliament,but when they were questioned by the public about taking action to go in andliberate them, were met with a long period of silence before a statement that saidthat it was still a civil matter and that they didn’t want to formally bring out thearmed forces to liberate the members of parliament for fear that it would spur ona second round of violence from a new group of anarcho-restorists who had beenlying silent all these while.

That day the phone rang. I happened to be at home, desperately reading asmany things as I could to find out where the wounded from the shopping districtmob were sent to. I picked it up and listened to it.

“Hello, I am Colonel Bing, deputy director of public relations. Is Ms RuthXXXX there?”

“I am Ruth, why are you calling me?” I replied guardedly. I sort of guessedthat it was about your Uncle Ted, but it was better to not show what I alreadyknow. Besides, if the whole thing was a civil affair to begin with, why was amilitary officer the one calling me about him?

“I am calling you to inform you that Ted XXXX is currently located in Ward74C at YYYY Hospital. Is there anything you wish to clarify?”

“Yes, why are you telling me that for? Are you trying to entrap me? BecauseI have nothing to do with what my son had done.”

“No m’am, you are mistaken. It is not an entrapment. We are merely informingyou where your injured son is warded. You can visit him if you want; there are nolimitations on that on our end. We are not even trying to get you to get him toreveal anything—we will do our interview with your son when he is much better.Is there anything else you would like to clarify?”

I paused and thought hard. There were many things I wished to shout at thatmilitary officer, but I thought better about it. Some things were never meant tobe talked about anyway.

“No, colonel. Thank you for informing me.”

“It is my duty m’am. Have a good day.” The phone line clicked and wentdead.

I slammed the phone down. I was angry, very angry at the cockiness in whichthat Colonel Bing sounded. But at the same time, I was relieved, relieved thatyour Uncle Ted was found. I thought that your Uncle Ted was particularly stupidin his choice of the matter, but I couldn’t help but realise that at the back of mymind, I never did ever want him to come to harm.


You probably won’t understand this bit Lucille, until much later when you’remarried and have your own children to worry about.

Lucille: Did you go visit him once you knew where he was?

Ruth: No. I decided that I’ve had enough. I did what I wanted to do, sortof, in terms of extricating him out of the whole mess as best as I could. He’s nolonger that deep in the mess. He was still called for interviews and questioningsthough, but that was nearly a month after the whole thing blew over.

Lucille: How did it blow over?

Ruth: Your Uncle Ted didn’t tell you?

Lucille: He said he was woozy and was in hospital most of the time, and so hehadn’t really a good clue about what transpired.

Ruth: Bullshit. He was well aware about what happened. I think he’s justtrying to block things out of his head. If he won’t tell you, I’ll tell you whathappened and how everything blew over the way it did. In many ways, it’s justsad.

The long and short of it is that the whole anarcho-restorist movement was anutter and absolute failure. Not only did none of the things they were going forin terms of repealing of the laws that they deemed to be unconstitutional staygone, the whole Restoration Conflict affair actually triggered a completely robustresponse in the opposite direction, that is, towards supporting the status quo thatexisted before their little movement. I had seen it from a mile away—it was obviousthat there was no way such a silly little movement could actually work in the longrun, and it was because there was no support from the citizen at large in the firstplace, and secondly, there was no long term plan in terms of sustainability. Sure,it was a daring one-shot attempt to force their changes, but the lack of a plan toensure that the changes would stick was their nail in the coffin.

The authorities waited till the release of the members of parliament before theymade their move, in the mean time, biding their time and doing the investigativeleg work necessary to find out more about the whole anarcho-restorist movementin terms of its organisation, its manner of recruitment, the types of people thatwere involved, the types of people that led, the insider of the military that wassupporting them as a coup, the whole works. The whole investigation took along while, obviously, and it was roughly a month or two after the release of themembers of parliament were released that the full operation kicked in.

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The laws that the anarcho-restorists had forced the members of parliament toratify were in place for exactly one month, in which some of those who didn’tcomply were taken to task, but were somehow deadlocked in the courts wherejudgement was concerned. That dead lock was crucial—it ensured that none ofthose who were prosecuted by the “new” laws were actually going to face thefull wrath of the nonsense that was in the law at that time. Parliament hadbeen dissolved by that point, and the president had called for an election to beheld within a month—that was all well and proper without anything too odd.Actually, most of the state apparatus operated more or less the way they did withno changes, despite all the fanfare of the changes that the anarcho-restorists werepromising.

You mother visited your Uncle Ted during the three weeks that he was inhospital. I didn’t want to visit him at all. I was angry at the mess that he gothimself into. Moreover, my leave had run out by then and I had gone back to work.There were a few employees who didn’t make it back in time when their leavesexpired, and we had to let go of them. For the most part though, a surprisinglylarge number of them returned after their leave was up. To me it was very clear,despite all the perceived inequality that existed with the system, it was still thebasic need for an income to ensure survival that ensured that everyone would comeback for work. Those few who didn’t make it back were locals—I had checked itin the register and found it unsurprising.

Your Uncle Ted, like many others, were called in for interviews with the policeonce he was discharged from the hospital. He spent most of his time at home sincehe had lost his job from not returning for two months after his leave was up. Eachtime he was called for an interview, a couple of police officers would come overand drive him there in their squad car, as though he would run off the moment hecould. But of course that was not the case. Where could he run?

They didn’t charge him with anything, your Uncle Ted that is. That’s all Iknow. But he was slapped with a whole bunch of restrictions on his movementfor his involvement in the Restoration Conflict, like he couldn’t travel overseaswithout informing the court, and that he was barred from using the computerto connect to the Internet unsupervised. It was clear, however that he had beenchanged. He grew quieter and kept to himself even more, and never did talk toanyone about the past.

As for the whole aftermath of the laws the anarcho-restorists had forced theparliament to “fix”—it got ditched the first time the new parliament had convenedafter the election. Oh the election! Well, every one of the members of parliamentbefore ran nealy unopposed in the elections called for by the president, and at


the end of the day, except for the prime minister then who had to stay out dueto his injuries, every one who was a part of the parliament was back in it. Andthey promptly repealed all the changes they had made under duress during theso-called Restoration Conflict. In addition, they also crafted a new series of lawsthat targetted such insurrections, greatly broadening the powers available to thepolice to hunt down such dissidents who refuse to effect change of the system fromwithin the system, to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring all over again.

It was a few months after that when the inciting army officers were discovered.It turned out that it was one of the generals who had a personal vendetta againstthe prime minister who concocted the scheme to rouse the group of anarcho-restorists to engage in an armed rebellion to create enough chaos so that he couldmove his troups in for a coup d’Etat. While he was initially successful, the com-bined might of the armed forces council was sufficient to nullify his threat. Allthe commissioned officers under his charge who aided in the attempt were courtmartialled and sent to the gallows for treason, as was the general himself. The civilleaders among the anarcho-restorists were charged with abetting in the treason at-tempt and were sentenced to life imprisonment—they were spared from the deathpenalty since it was established that they were unwitting pawns in the whole affair.While they were guilty in that they took part in the entire Restoration Conflict,they weren’t seen as the original provocateurs and because of that, were givenmuch lighter sentences.

Ruth: So, Lucille do you know what this tells us?

Lucille: I. . . don’t know, grandma.

Ruth: Bah. More likely you don’t dare to say it. Nevermind, I’ll say it for you.You’ve got it on transcript and I’m an old woman now anyway, what can they doto me?

At the end of the day, the status quo will always win out in the case of anattempt to abruptly change the rules of a system. Let’s face it, all systems haveinertia, and by inertia I mean the inability to change rapidly given the stimuli.To many people, this is a bad thing, because it means that the system will not benimble enough to adapt to the changing circumstance. That’s the flawed reason-ing behind those anarcho-restorists. They could feel the labour crunch from theincreased numbers of foreign workers, they felt as though they were being squeezedout of their livelihoods by an uncaring government. And they thought they could

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force the hange that they want through the mere application of force, withoutthinking about how to deal with the associated inertia of the whole system to-wards such sudden changes. They were wrong on so many fronts: the governmentwas well aware of the situations that the anarcho-restorists were facing, and it wasapparent because just a couple of months later, new policies to curb the numberof foreign workers in the city-state were enacted into law while other policies tohelp citizens increase the relevance and competency of their skill sets were alsoput in place, which had the double effect of reducing the need of foreign labourby increasing the employability of the locals while at the same time make foreignlabour sufficiently pricey that it was still possible to hire them for the hopefullyfewer cases where a special requirement was needed.

Yes, it was a continuation of sorts of the original trajectory that was set fromthe policies of the past that led up to the Restoration Conflict. But it wasn’tjust a blind continuation—the government had been paying close attention to thedevelopments and changes in the environment. The anarcho-restorists were tooshort sighted to look beyond their immediate needs—the government had alreadyhad them covered on that front. All these can be easily checked against the historicrecords, as the neo city-state soared from one peak to another, while maintaininga good growth in the economy as well as having good social developments. Noticethat now, you don’t have any of the problems that were faced during that time,which goes to show that the policies actually worked. And that’s why I said thatyour Uncle Ted was just being stupid in just signing up for the nearest loudestshouting group of apes who are too dense to think even two steps ahead to seewhat was in store.

Lucille: Oh wow, okay grandma.

Ruth: Is that enough for you?

Lucille: Mostly. Do you have any other comments you want to make, maybesomething more concrete and personal like what happened at your company tillnow?

Ruth: Okay, it’s mostly quite boring, but I guess you need some kind of storycontinuation to put things into perspective.

Back at the company I was working, like I said, most of the people came backwhen their leaves ran out, and as promised, there were no ramifications from thecompany on them with respect to what they were doing during their free time.


Of course, no ramifications from us didn’t mean that there were no consequenceswhatsoever from what they had done, it was just that the consequences weren’tfrom us directly. A few of the employees were asked to visit the police centre togive their statements and be interviewed with regards to their involvement in theRestoration Conflict, and most of them were cleared of any of the treasonous wrongdoing. There were two of them who were deemed to have violated the new publicsafety laws in that they had gone to the confrontations and were discovered to havetaken part in a more violent form of protesting, as in they weren’t just standingthere in solidarity, they were actively entering the fray and throwing projectiles.They were eventually sentenced to five years in jail, and because of that, we hadto let them go and hire replacements. The MILSA project was delayed by aroundfour months, but the agreement we had with the clients ensured that we weren’tpenalised for the delay due to the national level crisis. A few other smaller projectswere also late in delivery, but there were no long term repercussions.

I left the company after another five years of work there, simply because I wasstarting to get tired with working with people. The new laws that were put inplace made the hiring process at human resources more and more onerous, and Idecided that I had better things to do with my time than to play catch up withall those laws. I trained my successor and left on good terms with the boss. In theintervening years, I just joined different companies to work as an administrativesupport assistant to ensure that I didn’t get bored, and to earn some pocket moneyfor fun. That’s basically about it for me.

Lucille: So grandma, would you say that you were a supporter of the neo-conservatists?

Ruth: In many ways, yes. I was there when the government was undergoingthe toughest times in building up the city-state, and I was there when they firstsucceeded. I knew what they could do, and was dismayed that the young’unsduring that time were that impatient and made such a stupid and irrecoverablemistake. I still support the government of the neo city-state, and know that theywill do good for us all. So yes, I’m a neo-conservatist through and through.

Lucille: Thanks grandma for your time.Ruth: No problem. If you see your Uncle Ted again, tell him that I still think

he’s an idiot for getting involved in the whole stupid thing. But tell him also thathe’s always welcome to come over for dinner any time. Just tell him to call aheadof time.

Lucille: Will do grandma.

3

It was two weeks since the last meeting that Lucille had with Mr Lim regarding theproject. The interview with Grandma Ruth was shorter than expected, but thenagain, even though Grandma Ruth had lived through that era and was a staunchneo-conservatist, it wasn’t as though she was as deeply involved as the way thatUncle Ted was while playing his ill-fated role as the fighter in the anarcho-restoristcamp. Still, there was a lot of new material to process, and Lucille was findingherself sitting at the touch-board screen in her dorm room doing as much researchas she could on the whole affair.

In many ways, the narratives from both Uncle Ted and Grandma Ruth werelargely compatible, albeit from different sides of the apparent divide present inthe Restoration Conflict. But it wasn’t as clean as it seemed, as Lucille found outthe more she read the transcripts. Yes, they were seemingly on different sides ofthe debate, if the Restoration Conflict could be called a debate, but they shared alot of commonalities. In both their interviews, it was clear that both sides of thecamps, or at least, from their two representatives in the form of Grandma Ruthand Uncle Ted, were talking about how to better the lives of the citizens of thecity-state. They were also willing to “work with the law”, which represented a typeof legitimacy that they were going for. The difference of course was largely basedon what “working with the law” meant. For Grandma Ruth, the neo-conservatist,it meant giving space for the government to make the decisions, choosing thetime frames in which policies that would help ease the problems away could beimplemented that could create the largest impact with the smallest disruption.But for Uncle Ted, the anarcho-restorist, it meant forcing the changes that wereneeded in as immediate a way as possible, and let the consequences sort themselvesout.

Surprisingly enough, Lucille started to find herself realising the advantages ofeach of the two philosophies that governed their movements. The neo-conservatistperspective was definitely most suitable for the long term, but it ran the real riskof alienating the very people whom they were trying to help, simply because the

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people that they were trying to help may not survive the short term hardshipduring the transitional phase. That was what Grandma Ruth was referring towhen she said that the anarcho-restorists were a bunch of “pussies”—they weresmart enough to observe the problems that were present, but were not hardynor resourceful enough to keep their noses straight and push through the hardtimes before the good times came over. But there were strong merits for thecase of the anarcho-restorists as well, if the status quo acknowledges the problemsbut does not demonstrate that they actually have a long term solution in thefirst place, it was likely that the status quo did not have any solution to beginwith. In fact, the arguments on the validity of the neo-conservatist perspectivesas given by Grandma Ruth had a strong hindsight quality in them—it was onlyknown after the Restoration Conflict that the government of the city-state hadsolutions to solve the problems that were present. Uncle Ted’s description of whathappened during that time indicated that when the anarcho-restorists decidedto band together to forcefully take over the parliament house, they only did sobecause there was no indication the people who were in power actually knew whatthey were doing.

Lucille stared at the arguments and comparative analyses that she was makingon the touch-board screen and sat back in her chair, leaning backwards to stareoff into space for a moment. Processing such political arguments were always hardon herself, not because they were particularly hard to understand, but that therewas the acute need of ordering the arguments such that they “make sense”, It wassomething that she just wasn’t that used to doing—engineering arguments had aform of elegance behind them, being one of those true or false things that couldeasily be verified with small scale experiments or with some calculations based ontheory. But history, it had none of that ability of experimentation. There wasjust no way of “turning back time” to re-run the whole incident with differentparameters just to see how things would turn out if some oof the conditions werechanged. And because of that, the arguments involved were rather convoluted andintricate at best.

A notification on her touch-board screen drew her attention back to it. It wasa message from Justin. Curious, she tapped on it with her finger to enlarge it.The message filled the screen and it said simply, “Dinner today at some wherespecial? I’ve not seem you for nearly a week. Miss you much. Hope to hear apositive reply. Love, Justin.”

Lucille sighed. Justin wasn’t wrong in feeling a little neglected—she hadn’tbeen hanging out with him over the past week and with good reason. She foundthat it was almost impossible to concentrate on the political arguments when he

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was around. It wasn’t that he distracted her in any way, but that his presence hada sort of. . . nullifying effect on her objectivity. It was clear from the discussionof her interview with Uncle Ted with Justin that he wasn’t exactly a supporter ofthe anarcho-restorists, and it seemed to her that he was almost like a fanatic neo-conservatist. It didn’t really bother her much even if he was a neo-conservatist—she really didn’t care much about all these frivolities as long as she could get a joband work—but his combative demeanour in supporting his view point when therewas no debate to begin with made it hard for her to get into a calm and objectivemood to do the careful comparative analysis that was needed for the final project.And with that, she banished him from her sight for the past week so that shecould take the time to figure things out, without any of that sort of distraction.

But it was clear he was feeling a little neglected. Lucille sighed again. Shereached out to the message and gave a quick flick of her fingers. It opened up anempty message screen and the microphone signal was blinking, showing that thetouch-board screen was ready for its input.

“Hahahaha. . . someone seems to be feeling a little neglected. Dinner today isfine, I’ll let you suggest the place. Come over in about an hour, I’m about donewith my analysis for the day. Miss you too. Love, Lucille.”

When she was done dictating to the touch-board screen, she flicked her fingerat the transcribed message and it immediately shrank itself down and faded to acorner, where an icon was showing that the message had been successfully sent toits receiver. A few short seconds later, another message notification came on andLucille checked on it, only to find a single message “¡3, Justin” written in it.

Lucille smiled to herself. It was a lovely gesture from Justin, just one of thethings that he did for her that made her feel as though they should be togetherforever. Except well, forever meant more like getting married some time in thefuture since they would all die eventually. She chuckled to herself again; it wassuch a typical line of thought that she would have, taking things so literally.

She wrapped up the last bits of her analyses for the day and chucked all thedocuments back into the history project folder. She would send out an updatemessage to Mr Lim tomorrow in time for the next meeting slated for the upcomingMonday. The analyses that she had thus far was probably enough for about threequarters of the report she had to write, and she had one more interview to go tosatisfy the three interviews as primary sources requirement. With the work mostlydone, she dragged out a solitaire game from the games folder on the touch-boardscreen and started to finagle with it to kill time.

One hour later, at six o’clock exactly, Justin came to her dorm room, knock-ing on her door and announcing himself. She smiled and unlocked the door for

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him, and he came in immediately with a bunch of roses in his hand. He walked to-wards her and kissed her on the cheeks from behind her chair while simultaneouslyhugging her from behind with the bunch roses in front of her.

“For me?” Lucille asked, a little stunned but secretly touched.

“For you. Shows you how much I missed you,” Justin said as he squatted lowenough such that they were at the same height, except he was still hugging herfrom behind with the back rest of the chair between them.

“Awww. . . you missed me that much huh. . . but tell me, did you miss memore or the chair more, because it seems like you’re hugging the chair more thanI,” Lucille replied with a cheeky smile. Justin’s face turned beet red and stoodup. Lucille stood up too and with an impish grin, glomped him.

The two of them were locked in a deep embrace for nearly five minutes, juststanding there in the middle of her dorm room, hugging tight, as though it werea meeting that was planned a decade earlier. A strong sense of calm and securityflowed through Lucille as she held on tightly to Justin’s athletic figure, his strongarms and chest holding her tightly enough to feel as though he were her personalsuit of armour that could protect her from anything that would come by.

“Mmmmm. . . that was nice,” Lucille said finally when the warm embrace wasdisturbed by the rather loud gurgling of her stomach.

“Sounds like you are hungry,” Justin said removed his arms from around herand held her hands and gazed at her face.

“Indeed I am,” Lucille replied, careful to hold her tongue about the historyproject. She had learnt her lesson from that time, when the mere mentioning ofthe project created a buzz kill to the lovely ambience that they were having. Shedidn’t want that to happen now, not when they hadn’t really meet up and hangout for the past week. It was not a moment to be spoiled like that.

“I have just the place for you,” Justin said as he released one of her hands andheld her by the other one to lead her. Lucille picked up the flowers from her tableand held it with her free hand.

“Oh?”

“Yes, that steak house place. Anton’s. My treat today, for my most excellentestgirlfriend.”

“ ‘Most excellentest’? My my, some one is too happy to see me to remembertheir grammar, huh?” Lucille replied jokingly as she winked at him.

The two of them held hands and walked out of the dorm room and headed outto the steak house.

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The steak house was a ten-minute walk from her dormitories, and it included ashort cut through the garden that the alumni donated for. They walked through itin loving silence, with her leaning in to him for warmth and support as they madetheir way slowly to the steak house. But at the back of her mind, Lucille couldnot forget that day when they walked through the same garden and nearly had afall out over their differing views on the matter of the Restoration Conflict. ‘Don’tspoil the moment, Lucille,’ she thought to herself as she walked along lazily withJustin, ‘that’s in the past now. Think about the present and the future. Think ofthe steak, the good and tasty steak. And the company of your boyfriend, Justin.’

“Thinking of something?” Justin asked quietly, as he nuzzled on her hairgently.

“Not really,” Lucille said. “Just thinking of the steak.”

Justin laughed.

“I’m glad you are looking forward to this. You know, all these time that youweren’t available to hang out, I was starting to feel a little depressed myself,”Justin said as he led her through the short cut by the arms as she leaned her headon his shoulders. It was an awkward position to walk in, but they didn’t mind asingle bit. It was bliss for them to be in such close proximity, despite the humiditythat was enveloping them.

“You felt depressed? Why?”

“I don’t know. . . maybe because I love you?”

“Aww. . . but you know I needed the time to work through the history project.”‘Damn,’ Lucille thought to herself. ‘You’ve just went ahead to break the lovelyfeeling.’

“Hmm hmm. . . ” Justin replied absent-mindedly, as though he did not noticethe sudden stiffening of Lucille on the mention of the history project. Lucillerelaxed herself a little and they walked on in more silence. ‘At least he hasn’tmade a big fuss of it, unlike last time,’ Lucille thought to herself.

The wooden cabin that housed the steak house loomed beyond the small hillthat rounded the path they were walking on. It was an old-fashioned log cabin,made with imported wood stacked vertically upwards. It looked out of place, forsure, amid the smooth post-modern architecture that surrounded the park. Therewas something more to be said about its anomalous existence—though it was alog cabin, it seemed like the one that one would build in the middle of a forest asopposed to being a ranch, which was the concept of the steak house given all theother cowboy paraphernalia. But bad decoration aside, the cabin housed Aston’s,the best steakhouse to be found on campus or anywhere in that neighbourhood.

They walked up to the door and was greeted by the waitress. “Do you have a

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reservation?”“Yes, under Justin. . . ”“Ah, yes, I see your name. Party of two? This way please. . . ” The waitress

opened up the cabin doors and picked up two menus from behind the podium andled the way into the restaurant.

The two of them entered and proceeded to have a quiet evening of dinner,seemingly having made up from the misunderstanding that they had just a weekor so before.


Lucille: Hi ma.Linda: Pfft. What’s with that phoney greeting?Lucille: It’s recorded. I don’t want something weird to happen in the tran-

script.Linda: Bah. Didn’t you say it’s just like a conversation, except I’m the one

talking most of the time and we’re talking about the past that no one really waantsto talk about in any detail due to the old wounds of the past opening up onceagain?

Lucille: Yes ma, but you know. . . it’s for the history project.Linda: I swear that you put in more effort for this history project than all of

your other engineering projects combined. Okay, you want me to talk about theRestoration Conflict?

Lucille: Well, your experiences through that era. Not necessarily only theRestoration Conflict though.

Linda: Your grandma told me you talked to her about this. You went to Tedtoo, right?

Lucille: Yeah, I talked with Uncle Ted as well.Linda: Heh. That brother of mine. I wonder what he told you. You can’t tell

me, yes?Lucille: No I can’t.Linda: Okay okay. Let me begin.

I was about your age when it all began. I didn’t understand what the wholefuss was about at that time, but as it all went on I eventually figured out whatwas going on. But I promised to start from the beginning.

I graduated from junior college back in 2012 or so and was studying at thePolytechnic University of XXXX in 2013. Back in the day, the university wasa little less rigorous as what you have right now—they really put in a lot of

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effort to improve their standards, from the multiple revamps of the courses, therefocusing of the research efforts, the whole works. So the university you arefamiliar with now is a completely different animal then. Despite all of that though,the university was still the better one in the city-state, and I was there, doing abachelor’s degree on social sciences and business. It wasn’t the first choice thatI was going for, considering the highly unlikely possibility of getting any form ofgainful employment outside of joining the political cadre, but I didn’t have muchof a choice given my dismal junior college graduation exams.

It was around 2014 or 2015 when the whole showdown started. Before thatthough, there had been grouses that were raised by the citizens of the city-state.It started off with a couple of web sites that some disgruntled but techie citizensslapped together to provide an avenue for people to share and comment on theirgrouses, not unlike a blog, but definitely less sophisticated. The availability ofthat web site made the exchange of opinions fast and furious, and after a whilethe authorities caught wind of it and legislated enough to pull out most of theteeth and claws from the web sites. That was when the personal blogs startedsprouting, with quite a few “celebrity” bloggers writing about various forms ofanalyses and opinion pieces based on what the government was saying that day.It didn’t quite capture the impact of the original websites that had been declawedand detoothed, so it moved on to somthing more. They went to the forums,with boards that people would post their observations and undergo discussions,sometimes in very heated ways. Then of course the same pattern came and theforums were clamped down hard by the government of the city-state.

That was when people started wising up and using the dark net. You see,there’s like a shadow internet that coexists with the regular internet where youcan visit web pages and participate in discussions on blogs and so on. The shadowinternet rides on the regular internet infrastructure, but had the ability to com-pletely mask out the users that are connected to it by assigning connection ad-dresses in a completely peer-to-peer way. This meant that it was no longer thateasy to use the computer’s address as an easy means of linking particular com-ments or posts to a specific computer which in turn reveals the person behindit. It used lots of cryptography as its core, and relied on donated bandwidth ofexisting computers to help keep the dark net alive.

I really wasn’t that involved in the whole dark net thing—that was more ofmy brother’s, your Uncle Ted’s I mean, thing, plus I was quite young then whenhe first got involved with the dark net. He was the computer genius in the house,with good reason—he was the one with the computer-related degree or diplomaor whatever it was, and it showed. He was always locked up in his room, always

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working with the computer on one thing or another. He was the one who learntabout the dark net from some of the local hackers that were still lurking on existingforums—they sent him a private message with the details one day or something.So, my brother set up his little dark net node and went his merry way, gettinginvolved in some kind of activism organised almost completely over the dark net.

So anyway, that went on for quite a while, even as he was working at thatcomputer programming job of his. I never really asked much about his life; it’snot that I hate him, but I had always found what he was doing to be odd at best.Maybe it’s got something to do with the age difference, but you know, I reallydidn’t think about such stuff, and I am not starting on that now.

Near 2015 or so, things heated up. Even the mainstream media was reportingabout this sinister dark net where murders, protestors, rapists and other low-lifehang out to plan their crimes. Not completely wrong, but they were spinning thecomplaints about governing policy as a form of terrorist activity and that was, inmy opinion, the most toxic thing that they could do. I mean, a government thatcannot take criticism is the chief reason why people went underground to starttheir clandestine discussions about all the problems in the first place.

I got Ted to set up my computer to connect to the dark net. As a student ofsocial sciences, it seemed important to at least have a front seat view of the circusthat was to happen. I didn’t participate in any of the discussions, but was merelysitting in as an observer, reading off the stuff they were planning on the forums.Everyone used nicknames, so I didn’t know which was Ted and which wasn’t. In away, it was a good thing, particularly when I was interviewed by the police in theaftermath of the violent clashes. It was easier to actually answer “I don’t know”when I really didn’t know what was going on. Some of the things that were saidmade sense, but there were a lot of them that were stupid at best and downrightdangerous at worst. In fact, there was a very big response to a forum threadthat talked about some kind of armed resistance towards the government of thecity-state, and from it sprang out the so-called “anarcho-restorist” movement. Iwas sure that Ted was involved with that, but without any actual evidence of himlogging in and posting stuff in the thread that talked about home-made projectileweaponry. He was also starting to sneak off outside ever so often, only returningroughly three hours later. I followed him one time and saw that he was headingto the nearby hackerspace, and through the window louvres, I saw that he wascarving up this object that looked vaguely like a rifle.

But I didn’t tell Mom about it. She’s crazy. Crazy conservative and uncom-promising. And always thinks she’s in the right because she went through moreof life than we did, or so she claims. There was no point in discussing any of


these developments with her—I made the mistake of trying it once before andthe hour-long lecture was a good enough reminder to tell me to never talk aboutthis with her. To her, the government could do no wrong, because it was the onethat managed to pull the city-state up from nothingness into greatness. Nevermind what we learn in social science theory. Never mind that our analysis showedthat it was also partly due to the general lacklustre performance of the countriessurrounding us that seemingly propelled us way above our weight class. Nevermind that many PhDs have spent years thinking about these things and comingup with well-reasoned arguments on these. So I just didn’t bother to talk withher.

But I don’t agree with the philosophy of the “anarcho-restorists” either. Firstly,“anarcho-restorist” is such a stupid name. I know, I know, it was a name givenby the mainstream media when trying to find convenient labels for the involvedparties to facilitate their job at spin, but the fact that they then embraced the labeldefies my understanding. “Anarcho”? Really? They didn’t actually overthrow thegovernment and release the city-state into a state where everyone would live bywhat they want—they merely involved slightly more violent actions and somehowthat made them “anarchists”. Secondly, their method of attack is wrong, totallyand absolutely wrong. Yes, the laws are broken, but forcing legislators at gunpointto “fix” them isn’t going to do any good. It’s probably better to rebuild the public’sstrength in counteracting the stupidity that parliament may throw out by makingconstitution changes all referedum based. But noooo. . . it takes too long, andthey hungered for results, and that’s why they did what they did.

Besides, apart from those “anarcho-restorists”, no one else seemed to do any-thing to address the changes needed to adjust the policies to fit the faster changinglandscape. Anyone who is observing will know that the times that were faced wereno longer like the ones that came before.

Of course, I’m not saying that the “neo-conservatists” – eww I dislike thatlabel as well—were any better. If anything, they were the reason why the wholemess that the anarcho-restorists were talking about came to be. But they had themoral high ground here—at least they are willing to keep with the law in whateverthey do, or at least, profess to do so until the confrontation began.

I was at home when they first did their “operation”. I was reading and keepingthe television on at a low volume. Ted wasn’t at home—he had left early enoughthat morning to probably wait with the rest of his brethern at the shopping district.Mom was futzing about the house instead of being in the office since it was aweekend and all, and complaining about not knowing where Ted was. At thattime, the anarcho-restorists were not yet named since the mainstream media hadn’t

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technically heard of them. I knew that he was going to the shopping district—hetold me before he left for some reason—but I wasn’t going to be the one to tellMom about his whereabouts. She’d probably flip and start an argument with meover something that I didn’t have much control over. In short, it meant gettinghit with unnecessary amounts of drama that I didn’t really want to deal with.

Lucille: You mean you knew all that was going on even before Uncle Ted wentout?

Linda: D’oh. I told you, he helped me set up the dark net connection, and Iwas paying close attention to the same forums that he was, since it was obviouswhich ones were relevant. In many ways, the existence of the dark net made themcomplacent or even careless. They were still smart enough to use their nicknamesinstead of their real names, but they didn’t go the extra step of obfuscating thecontents of what they were speaking, so sure they were about their abilities tohide away from authority.

Lucille: What do you mean, ma?

Linda: I mean, using nothing more than say the forum-based search, it waspossible to locate all the threads of discussions that pertained to their plot andthe entire conversation was easily traced and understood. I mean, you’re talkingabout me, not directly involved in any way, a mere observer, and even I could puttogether what it was they were planning. What do you think the authorities coulddo?

Lucille: I’m not sure if I’m understanding this. Are you saying that the gov-ernment of the city-state already knew about the whole thing that was to come?If so, why’d they allow it to continue?

You are right. I am saying that they knew what was being planned. Now,who exactly in the government knew is up to anyone’s guess, but it was clearthe the activities that were going on did not go unnoticed. I thought about itbefore, and it was staring quite blatantly in my face. The presence of peoplewho claimed that they were from the military and were sympathetic to the cause,and most shockingly of all, offered support and help in procuring and supplyingthe armaments that were needed for their planned course of action. I got verysuspicious, of course, because it was well known that the government, or at leastthe parliament that was being targetted by the anarcho-restorists, had strongconnections with the military, and that they were always willing to back each


other up by hook or by crook. A putsch was extremely unlikely by any regard.Yet that was being offered over the dark net forums. Of course there was no easyway to guarantee the identity of the person who was claiming such access as wasthe nature of the dark net, but eventually he or she managed to convince everyoneof the veracity of the statements and they were all planning away.

I was observing of course. It looked like a bad idea all in all. I didn’t bring itup with my social sciences professor for fear that they got all uncomfortable andouted me as though I were a conspirator. So all I did was to continue to watchand observe.

So that day, Ted went out to the shopping district, and I was keeping thetelevision on while working half-heartedly on a piece of homework. The news wasblaring quietly, and Mom was futzing about. Then a breaking news came on—the parliament house was assaulted by group of armed personnel. At the sametime, there were also reports of spontaneous gatherings of people both armed andunarmed at four or five locally centralised locations all throughout the city-state,and they were erecting barricades and stationing themselves behind them, keepingtheir armed personnel on the perimeter and their unarmed people behind them.The reports also said that contingents of police officers were deployed to each of thelocations to observe and attempt to break up the gatherings through diplomacy,and that riot police were also being sent to the larger gatherings in case things gotugly.

I kept an eye on the television broadcast while working quietly on my home-work. Mom was still futzing about until she realised that the television was notshowing its usual drivel on a weekend and stopped, before grabbing the televisionremote control to raise the volume. The hurried words of the newscaster blaredover the television speakers and jarred my ears. I already knew what was goingon without even having them yell out like that due to the much faster conveyanceof the news from the ticker tape than from the talking head himself.

“Did you know they are assaulting parliament house now?” Mom asked me ina forced voice.

“Yeah, I know.”

“How do you even know?” She demanded, as though I were a part of conspiracythat she knew I was in.

“Didn’t they just reported it on the news? You were watching it too, aren’tyou?” I replied without so much as looking away from my home work. There wasno good reason why I would look up from my home work now to talk with her—itwas obvious that she was itching for an argument on the merits and issues relatingto the assault on parliament house. I didn’t want to entertain her on that.

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The rest of the day passed more or less in the same way. The talking headsdominated the air waves, with all regular programming completely thrown out.Some of the more usual political pundits were interviewed, and each of them, withthe same facial expression that it seemed farcical, claimed that it was a “shockingand altogether unbelievable occurrence in the political history of the city-state”.It was comical but sad, all these self-proclaimed experts saying nothing more thanwhat any other lay person would have said. Of course, there was a good reasonwhy they couldn’t say anything more, ignorance aside. If they didn’t toe theofficial line of being utterly surprised, again the state machinery would start tochurn to stick conspiracy charges on them, just because at this point it wasn’tclear who or what it is to blame for the sudden incidents.

I didn’t pay much attention to the television at that point and concentratedhard on my home work instead. It was supposed to be an essay analysing some-thing related to the aftermath of the Korean war, and I was busy sketching out thegist of the writing before I sat down in front of my computer to type it all up intothe format that was needed. Then the television blared out louder than normal,with a very uneasy looking reporter standing in front of an obviously hastily setup outdoor set.

“This just in. We have received word from the armed men from within theparliament house. They had breached into the chambers of the parliament houseand are holding the entire parliament hostage. Their spokesperson had handed avideo tape to us with instructions to show it on television, otherwise they wouldkill all the members of parliament. So, here’s what they sent out to us.”

The screen cut over to an obviously pre-recorded message. The back drop wasa still image of the parliament house’s exterior, placed behind probably via somekind of green-screen technology. The spokesperson on screen was not masked atall—a ballsy move—but he was someone that I didn’t know. He looked calmand confident, and when he smiled, he looked sincere, unfitting of the blood lustydescription that was put forth by the reporter.

“Fellow citizens!” He said, again grinning. “Do not fear us! We are nothere to harm you. We are doing all of you a service. For a long time we wereunder the oppression of a government that felt that economic output was moreimportant than the welfare of the citizens of this city-state. For a long timewe saw our constitution’s integrity torn up and trampled upon by the increasinglycitizen-unfriendly laws, all in the bid for short term improvements to the economy.We know that the original constitution is not perfect, but at least, it stood forthe very principles we cared about. Today, my fellow citizens, we have come torestore the constitution back to its pristine condition, by forcing these money-


grubbing members of parliament to rescind and disavow legally all the conditionsand exemptions that they had thrown into the legal system against our constitutionover the years. For too long we have sat there quietly and tried to convince themthat there was something wrong, that something needed fixing. But what did theydo? They ignored us, because we weren’t a united voice, because we weren’t loudenough, because we didn’t catch their attention.

“Fellow citizens, today we have caught their one hundred percent attention,and we will bring about the change that everyone has been asking for. If yousupport our movement, make yourselves heard by joining your fellow citizen atany of the following places: main shopping district, central business district, northtown district, central town district, west town district and east town district.

“This time, we will be heard, and we will not stop till we have recovered whatwas taken away from us. Long live the city-state!”

“That’s a pompous ass right there, thinking that they can forcefully changethings like that. . . it’s not going to work. What do they think, that the gov-ernment is stupid?” Mom said out loud, to no one in particular, but obviouslydirected towards me since I was the only person in the house who was nearby andhad the strong potential of caring a damn.

I just rolled my eyes and kept on working on my home work. Once I wasdone with the planning, I quietly left the living room and headed back to mybedroom where my laptop was. I left the television running on purpose—I knewthat secretly, Mom was interested to see what was going on so that she can getall belligerent on things. I just didn’t want to engage her in any conversation Icould during that time period. Actually, even now, I don’t really want to engageher in any conversation. Her stubbornness never changes, and it gets bloodyexasperating when trying to explain anything—no amount of evidence will everchange her point of view, that’s for sure.

So anyway, for the next few days, there was a steady report on the goingson at the parliament house, and there were reports on the fronts at the variousgathering places. Some of the places saw violent clashes between the protestors—now named “anarcho-restorists” by the mainstream media—and the riot police,with many injured and some killed on both sides. The word on the street was thatthere were infantrymen attached to each of the anarcho-restorist gathering places,and they had brought along some actual infantry weapons to augment the home-made muskets that most of the other armed personnel were using. The strangestpiece of news I heard was the deployment of army troops to parliament house.They were deployed there, but only hung out at the exterior, with their garrisonset up to repel potential invaders than to actually lay siege on those that were

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already inside. It was quite perplexing, and it supported a whole lot of conspiracytheories out there.

I periodically checked out the dark net for any sort of news that was not fromthe mainstream media. The threads that were used for planning had morphed intosome kind of coordinated command and control among the cores of the five or sixdistricts in which the anarcho-restorists had set up barricaded camps. All in all, thereports of the mainstream media on the casualties sustained had been accurate,quite unlike much of the reporting that they had done before on other issues.There were also reports from the anarcho-restorists’ core that an opposing protestgroup had started to gather on the outside, trying to encircle them and eventuallyoverwhelm them, but that mob didn’t have the numbers nor the equipment yet todo any lasting harm.

It was almost a week or so later that the mainstream media reported on thegathering of a large group of people who were not anarcho-restorists—they weredubbed the “neo-conservatists” especially after they started chanting their slogansand motto revolviing keeping the law as it is and to oust, arrest and sentenceharshly those who had dared to upset the equilibrium and status quo—anyonewho identified themselves as being anarcho-restorists.

Mom was starting to get insufferable over all these time. She had pestered megreatly about where Ted went, and I kept my usual “I don’t know” stance. Shestarted to get angry and annoyed enough to actually take official leave from workand went out on her own to each of the districts in the attempt to look for him.She claimed that she wanted to “drag Ted out of the stupid mess he got himselfinto before he got killed”, but I think that she just wanted to do that to makesure that she wasn’t somehow implicated in the whole incident to get one of therumoured “blackmarks” against her for future hiring. She had wanted to drag mealong to look for him, but I put my foot down and told her that I needed to workon classes and not skip off just to do what was essentially her own wishes and notmine. She huffed and puffed and played all passive aggressive towards me, but inthe end, left me well alone.

When it was clear that no one in authority was willing to step up to takecharge during this crisis, things started to move under their own momentum. Theneo-conservatists got more organised, and started to get equipment and supportthat was comparable to that of the anarcho-restorists. That meant of course accessto the same kinds of infantry weapons and even plains clothed soldiers mixing intheir midst to bolster their deadliness and effectiveness. It was a clear case of aproxy skirmish that was being held between the incumbent military officers andthose who had fired the first shot literally by supporting the anarcho-restorists.


Another good thing came out of it though. Without any actual official guidanceon who was taking charge, there was little fear of retaliation from the relativelyfree discussion of the events. That meant that even my social science professorscould take the opportunity to spur discussion and debate over the merits betweenthe anarcho-restorists’ stance and that of the neo-conservatists’. It was an eye-opening experience, the first time that we were actually talking about somethingthat was relevant as opposed to musing about things that were long past. We didquite a few essays discussing our viewpoints regarding the whole incident thus far,and the professors themselves analysed the situation with us. It felt surreal, asthough for once we could actually experience political change ourselves withouthaving to got through the library and read up on the opinions from a third or evenfourth party view point.

That brought its own source of problems as well, of course. When one was livingthrough the times, it was hard to see beyond what was immediately available. Thelack of actual distance away from the situation meant that much of the analysisand understanding could end up being extremely myopic and missing the mark,but since the whole thing was an incident waiting to happen for a long time, thediscussions tended to be poignant and relevant.

Anyhow, it was roughly a few weeks into the whole thing that was dubbedthe “Restoration Conflict” by the mainstream media when it got very ugly veryquickly. The sequestering of the members of parliament was estimated to be com-ing quickly to a close, at least, as reported by the reporter who was getting videotapes from the team of anarcho-restorists that were in the parliament house. Itwas clear that soon, authority would be returning, and there was an undercurrentof blood to be had for the wasted time and productivity that was spent by allthe protestors, both anarcho-restorists and neo-conservatists. Most of the hatewas directed at the anarcho-restorists, since they were the ones who had upset thestatus quo first.

It started innocuously. There was a quiet but large deployment of heavilyshielded riot police at each of the districts. They had formed a perimeter sur-rounding all the protestors that were within it. Then, over time, they were slow-ing reducing the size of the encirclement. The reporters that were on-site werebarred from being too close to what was happening, and were forcibly relocatedto locations some fifty metres away from the action to do their reporting. But itdidn’t matter, what they said were still the same. The noose was tightening.

At first, nothing much happened. But slowly, the protestors that were nearestthe encirclement tried to leave, but found themselves pushing against the bulwarkthat was the shields of the riot police. With the ever increasing push from the riot

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police, they had no choice but to be pushed backwards. And with each such push,the protestors were slowly but surely forced into an immediate confrontation. Andsoon, they did. The neo-conservatists nearer the border of no man’s land didn’twant to charge the anarcho-restorists, but the sheer inertia from everyone pushingbehind meant that there was no where else to go. So they reluctantly inchedcloser to reduce the gap of no man’s land. Then someone from somewhere in themiddle tossed molotov cocktails in the general direction of the anarcho-restorists,which prompted a robust reply in the form of semi-automatic fire against theneo-conservatists. That triggered a cascading effect of violence between the twogroups, with armed people firing at each other.

The reporters were grim when they made their report. Many were hurt, andsome were even dead on both sides. But there was no letting back—the riot policewere continuing to tighten their lasso on each of the groups of protestors acrossthe districts. Mom was starting to get all frantic and panicky about Ted’s safety.I started to tune myself out—it was never a good time to talk with her anyway,not when she was as frantic as the way she was. Then suddenly she shouted atme.

“What?” I yelled back angrily.

“Did you see that? That’s your brother right there, on the stretcher. In thebackground.”

“What the hell? Did you go mad? What makes you think it’s him?” I repliedand stared hard at the small clumps of pixels behind the reporter. So much for“high definition”—if not for the movements, I couldn’t even tell if that blob werehumans or inanimate objects.

“I don’t know! I just know ! Quick, find out which hospital they are sendinghim.”

“Look, I’m as anxious as you (anxious yes, but not panic-mode anxious), butthere’s no use getting all riled up for something that you saw in the background.I don’t even know how we are supposed to find out which hospital he was at.”

“I don’t care! Help me find it!”

“No! Do it yourself damnit !” I shouted and stomped out of the living room,livid.

We eventually got a phone call from the hospital informing us where Ted waslocated, and Mom predictably went all psycho and visited him, obvious angryand distraught. I visited Ted every now and then, but since school was moreimportant, I paid more attention to that.


Linda: Is that enough for your project?Lucille: Uhh. . . hold on. . . I’m not sure. Can’t you tell me anything about

what happened after that?Linda: I could, but it’s boring. Mainly, Ted underwent quite a bit of interviews

and interrogations to determine his role in the entire Restoration Conflict mess. Iwas interviewed once, but I disclaimed knowledge and participation with enoughevidence to back me up, they let me go quick. Mom went through a couple ofinterviews as well, but she was obviously only involved as much as it was necessaryto look for and pull out Ted from the mess. On the whole though, the aftermathwas quite a big reaction. The things that were repealed during the sequestrationof parliament house were reinstated using some obscure argument that invalidatedany changes to the law when under duress, with the reasoning that being underduress meant that parliament was “not effective in discharging its duties in aprofessional and reasonable manner” and therefore any decision they made wasautomatically revoked as inadmissible. There were quite a few people who wereindicted under charges of treason from the whole fiasco of the Restoration Conflict.Ted got away under some kind of plea bargaining that barred him from contactwith any of the other people who were involved in the anarcho-restorists, and faceda suspended charge of abetting to commit treason. I think a few of the leaders whowere slapped with really heavy charges on treason ended up being executed—noneof them ever ended up with a commuting to a life sentence.

Lucille: That’s it?Linda: You were expecting more? There’s all there was to it for the Restoration

Conflict. Some people got pissed off with the system, tried to force changes, buthad their entire effort gone to waste because they didn’t think ahead far enough.

Lucille: I see. . . Thanks ma.Linda: No problem. Hope this helps you with that project of yours. I don’t

know what your grandma and Uncle Ted told you, but I’ll just remind you this:they have their own biases on the situation because of which sides of the fencethey were standing on. I don’t claim to be neutral, but I have my biases too. Tryto remember that when you’re writing that essay for your project.

Lucille: Yes ma.Linda: So, when are you inviting your boyfriend over for a nice meal, hmm?

4

“What do you mean ‘no’? Is this a joke, Lucille?”“Look, I need to get this history project done. All I need is another two more

weeks to finish up the final report.”“But you promised that you would be going with me on this trip during the

break! Hell, I’ve even bought the air tickets and everything! What am I supposedto do with all these now? It’s not like it’s cheap or anything!”

“Come on, Justin, be reasonable. I didn’t mean to blow you off like this, butit can’t be helped! I sent in my first draft to Mr Lim for critique, and he saidthat there were some parts that I needed to rethink how I wanted to present it.You know I’m not very good at these kinds of project and that I need the time toquietly think about it before I write it up.”

“Then do it in the last week and just go on the trip with me on the first week!What’s wrong with that arrangement?” Justin asked again angrily in Lucille’sdorm room, his face flashing with perplexity.

“Because I need the two weeks.”“You are still not answering my question.”“Fine. You want an answer,” Lucille snapped. “I can’t fucking think about

the project when you’re around.”“Oh? Why is that?”“You want to know? You really want to know?”“Fuck yes. You’re blowing off a trip that we had planned in the beginning

of the semester, with little warning, a trip that cost us quite a bit of money toput together, and you’re acting like I’m the one being unreasonable. You’d betterfucking tell me why you can’t think about the project when I’m around.”

“Because your presence biases me and makes me unable to express my truethoughts to myself on the project. You’re so strongly anti-anarcho-restorist andpron-neo-conservatist that I keep finding myself having to check myself before Isay anything to you in case I talk about the history project and you show yourdispleasure at the so-called positiveness that I was giving to the side of the anarcho-

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restorists.”“But you are wrong! You are completely and absolutely wrong ! The anarcho-

restorists are history, they are history ! It’s all in the past, why are you trying toglorify them?”

“For fuck’s sake, I am not glorifying them! Be reasonable! I need to do decentlyon this history project so that I can graduate. And to do so, I need to be fair toboth sides of the situation when writing about them.”

“Just because there are two sides of any situation doesn’t mean that any ofthem deserve the same kind of treatment. You know that the anarcho-restoristswere absolutely wrong. You know that! You know that well! So you cannot bewriting anything good about them!”

“Get out. Get out ! You are being childish here Justin. I don’t want to talkto you. Get the FUCK out NOW !” Lucille screamed as she shoved Justin out ofher dorm room and slamming the door behind him.

“You stupid bitch! Fuck you too!”Lucille leant behind the door and slid slowly to the ground, crying. It was one

of the most stupid arguments to have, on all things, the way in which a piece ofschool work is done. As she cried, her engineering mind slowly took over. If hecouldn’t even understand something as simple as having to be objective when itwas needed, how could they get along in the future.

Maybe she needed a long break away from him. Or a break up. Either onewould probably be preferrable. Slowly, Lucille got up from the floor and wipedher eyes, before walking to the touch-board surface to sketch out a new draft forher history report.

tales of the city · 2019-06-02 · 1 lucille sat on the front row of the lecture theatre, her...

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